Bolzano Film Festival Bozen – The winners of the 2024 edition

The 2024 edition of the Bolzano Film Festival closed on April 21st with the awards ceremony.

The jury awarded the best film award to Ivo by Eva Trobisch, a reflection on the mortality of existence inscribed in the story of Ivo, a home nurse who every day confronts his patients about their relationship with life and death. For the jury, Eva Trobisch’s film “explores the boundary between work space and private space and between life and death with precise and intelligent staging, describing all the nuances of an entire society in a state of waiting. Here no one is afraid of death, but everyone fears life.”

The special jury prize went to While The Green Grass Grows by Peter Mettler, an audiovisual diary that collects the filmmaker’s reflections arising from a dramatic event in his life: the shocking death of his parents. For the jury, Mettler’s is “uan irrepressible and unclassifiable film because it encompasses the complexity of the world and expands like life itself. The director marks the rhythm of continuous becoming through his biography. The film turns into a visual meditation on existence.”

Honorable mention for Puan by Maria Alchè and Benjamin Naishtat, a film that – according to the jury – “addresses current social conflicts with irony, questioning those ideals that wanted to change the world and the colonialist traps behind the paradigms of culture and philosophy and suggesting less grandiose but possibly more frank alternatives thanks also to good humor”.

The award for best artistic performance (direction and screenplay) goes to Sleeping With Tiger by Anja Salomonowitz, a biopic on the avant-garde painter Maria Lassnig, which the actress Birgit Minichmayr tells by following her at all ages and trying to give voice to all her changing mental states, using an approach bordering on the radical. For the jury the film “challenging the canons of the biopic both in writing and directing, he gives us a complex and at the same time frank and direct portrait of the life of a combative woman and a never conventional artist”.

The Euregio Young Jury award goes to The King Said. What a Fantastic and Machine by Maximilian van Aertryck and Axel Danielson, chosen, we read in the motivation, “for the profound connection with a contemporaneity dominated by the theme of the digitalisation of the image, which the film urgently discusses“. The same jury also awarded a special mention to Jonathan Schörnig’s film, Einhundertvier.

Finally, the city of Bolzano public award goes to the documentary My Stolen Planet by Farahnaz Sharifi, also passing through the 2024 Berlinale.