The Banishment voted best movie at Zagreb Film Festival

Posted by fanshawe

October 29, 2007

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s movie The Banishment (Izgnanie) has won the main prize at the 5th annual Zagreb Film Festival. The Russian film tells the tale of a married couple whose relationship goes through a crisis when the wife admits that she is pregnant with another man. The film stars Konstantin Lavronenko, who won the best actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and Scandinavian actress Maria Bonnevie. This is Zvyagintsev’s second feature film, following his critically acclaimed 2003 debut The Return (Vozvrashcheniye), which was nominated for a Golden Globe at the time.

Israeli director Yaniv Berman won the award for best documentary film with The Alpha Diaries, which follows the life of young men in the Israeli Reserve Service.

Bosnian filmmakers Sejla Kameric and Timur Makarevic’s What Do I Know, a 15 minute short consisting of a series of love stories featuring children in all roles, was voted best short film.

The audience award went to Dutch director Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control, a film that quickly won audiences thanks to its amazing cinematography and excellent performances from the relatively unknown English actor Sam Riley, who plays the late Joy Division singer, and Samantha Morton, who plays his wife Deborah, upon whose book Touching from a Distance the movie was based.

This year’s Zagreb Film Festival featured about 90 movies from 30 countries, with 41 movies competing for the main prizes.