Winners of the 2022 Euganea Film Festival
07 luglio 2022
The 21st Euganea Film Festival closes with the annoucement of the winners of the international competition.
The jury composed of Enrica Gatto, Enrica Capra and Sergio Trefaut decided to award the following prizes:
- Best Film - International Feature Documentary Competition: Downstream to Kinshasa by Dieudo Hamadi (Democratic Republic of Congo, 2020). According to the jury, the director shows how the wounds of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are still open, making the survivors the protagonists and capturing their great dignity. It is a tenacious film, full of energy, that honours the survivors without ever lingering on compassion.
- Best Animation - International Animation Competition: The Hole by Piotr Kaźmierczak (Poland, 2021). For the simplicity and power of a metaphor that becomes real. The loss/missing of a person results in a real hole in the paper, a tear in our lives that becomes wider and more devastating. The film, short and silent, takes our breath away for being so direct and unequivocal, showing us everyone's loneliness, without drama, but with great awareness.
- Jury Prize - International Feature Documentary Competition: Lines by Barbora Sliepková (Slovakia, 2021). Maintaining a light atmosphere, it manages to humorously portray the hidden mechanisms of the city and the people who make them work. Black and white allows the intersection of public and private space to be captured with a soundscape that grants a kind of musical dignity to the sounds of the city.
- Award Cinemambulante - International Feature Documentary Competition: NASCONDINO by Victoria Fiore (United Kingdom, 2022). The director enters the minds and hearts of viewers by bringing in the protagonists of this film. With a patient, respectful and sometimes complicit gaze, she reveals the many, complex and often contradictory forces of living in a complicated neighbourhood of Naples.
- Award Cinemambulante - International Animation Competition: LOOP by Pablo Polledri (Spain, 2021). A film whose strength lies in the social satire that it manages to portray with great irony, even comedy. We are all stuck in senseless actions within repetitive circuits. Someone wants us this way: unable to change and break out of our eternal patterns. The film leaves us with the hope that it is the old, abused concept of Love that will set us free.
- Special Mention - International Feature Documentary Competition: Never Coming Back by Mikołaj Lizut (Poland, 2021). It is a film that engages, saddens, moves. The director must be acknowledged for his perseverance and tenacity in telling the stories of these girls who try their best not to revert back. His is an intelligent, measured and elegant gaze that does not judge but courageously moves towards the truth.
