Frantz, Weirdos among Victoria Film Festival’s big winners
Two films that coincidentally embraced the visual splendour of black-and-white photography took top honours Sunday night during the awards presentation for this year’s Victoria Film Festival.
A post-war drama inspired by Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 classic Broken Lullaby collected the top prize at Endfest, the 23rd annual festival’s closing night social event at Fort Tectoria.
Frantz, French filmmaker Francois Ozon’s melodrama starring Paula Beer as a young German widow who has a lifechanging encounter with a mysterious Frenchman was voted best feature film by the festival jury.
Weirdos, Canuck icon Bruce McDonald’s quirky Nova Scotia road movie with an irresistible 1970s vibe and Canadian goldenoldies soundtrack, won the best Canadian film award.
The Cultural Currents Award went to festival favourite Richie Mehta for India in a Day, an innovative portrait capturing a day in the life of India through film, video and cellphone footage taken by locals.
The Happy Film, a meditation on happiness by graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, collected the award for best documentary.
The award for best short flim went to Quebec’s Guillaume Harvey for The Bomb, about a young man who reluctantly makes a bomb to get closer to his best friend’s seductive sister.
Blind Vaysha, Theodore Ushev’s Oscar-nominated National Film Board short about a girl with one green eye and one brown eye, won the award for best short animation.
The Cineplex Entertainment Audience Favourite Award went to Michael Melski for Perfume War, a documentary inspired by the true story of single mom and businesswoman Barb Stegemann and her best friend, Vancouver Islander Trevor Greene. After the Canadian soldier is axed in the head by a terrorist while serving in Afghanistan, she purchases orange blossom and rose oil from farmers to give them an alternative to the illegal poppy crop.
The winner in this category is determined by the largest percentage of favourable feedback received from filmgoers who rate individual films on post-screening ballots.
Senior category winners of FilmCAN, the festival’s annual student filmmaking competition, were St. Andrew’s Regional High School students Noah Hardy, Mari Chambers, Valeria Casados and Flavia d’Andreas for Be Happy.
Seren Bengston, Thomas Cotton, Annika Little, Devon Oneschuk, Liam Devlin and Alex Smitha won the junior category prize for Hide and Go … Stalk.
The 10-day festival that opened Feb. 3 showcased 124 features, documentaries, animated films and shorts.
The festival’s 24th edition is scheduled for Feb. 2-11, 2018.