European Film Awards 2006 Nominations
by Andre Soares
Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, about the relationship between two young women and the ghost of their dead mother, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives of Others, which follows a Stasi spy who begins to question his loyalty to the Communist party, are the two top contenders for this year’s European Film Awards.
Each film received 6 nominations (the European Awards have a mere 7 core categories listed this year), including Best European Film, Best Director, Best Actress (Penélope Cruz and Martina Gedeck, respectively), and Best Screenplay (Almodóvar and von Donnersmarck, respectively).
Other top contenders include Ken Loach’s Cannes Film Festival winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a war drama starring Best Actor nominee Cillian Murphy (also nominated for Neil Jordan’s injustice tale Breakfast on Pluto, which is also in the running for a Best Film award) and Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s docudrama The Road to Guantanamo, about three young Englishmen of Pakistani descent who are incarcerated and tortured at the "American Gulag."
And finally, Jasmila Zbanic’s family drama Grbavica, which depicts the lingering effects of the Bosnian War in the lives of a young woman and her mother when both face the truth about the identity of the girl’s father. The film won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.
With the exception of Volver – the likely winner in the Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography (José Luis Alcaine) and Best Composer (Alberto Iglesias) categories — all other Best Film nominees are dramas with a large dose of political commentary.
The large majority of the nominees are Western European productions or co-productions, mainly from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and Denmark. In fact, films mostly spoken in English (including the Spanish-made La Vida secreta de las palabras), German, and Danish account for 21 of the 36 nominations in the 7 core categories.
Cruz is the odds-on favorite for the Best European Actress award, though she has strong competition from the French Academy’s César winner Nathalie Baye, as a recovering alcoholic police officer in Le Petit Lieutenant, and Berlin winner Sandra Hüller, as a woman who is presumably possessed by the devil in Requiem. (One surprise European Actress nominee was Toronto-born Sarah Polley, for La Vida secreta de las palabras / The Secret Life of Words.)
The Best Actor trophy will probably go to either Cillian Murphy chameleon-like abilities — a dreamy transvestite cabaret singer in Breakfast on Pluto; a fighting Irish rebel in The Wind That Shakes the Barley — or Ulrich Mühe, for his conflicted spy in Das Leben der Anderen. Mühe may have an edge for being older, on top of the fact that, as a renowned East German stage star, he himself was a victim of the Stasi spying apparatus.
(Strangely, the European Awards have no "supporting actor/actress" category.)
French-born, Polish-raised producer-director-writer Roman Polanski will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award and British producer Jeremy Thomas will be honored with the Prix Screen International for "European Achievement in World Cinema."
Several other ancillary categories, including Best Non-European Film and the People’s Choice Awards will be announced in the coming weeks.
And in case you were wondering: Neither The Queen nor The Last King of Scotland were eligible for this year’s European Film Awards, for they opened in the fall. See below a couple of the European Film Academy’s film eligibility rules:
"In the 20 (twenty) European countries with the highest number of EFA members (as of 15th March 2006), these members vote directly for one film from among the national feature films released in their country between July 2005 and April/May 2006. The film having received the highest number of votes in each of these countries will automatically be included in the selection of films, provided it corresponds to the regulations of the European Film Awards"
"The selection of the app 20 remaining films is made by a committee composed of members of the EFA Board and a group of experts appointed by the Board. These remaining films are selected from proposals submitted before 15th June by European film institutions, festivals, trade magazines, media partners, members of the European Film Academy and producers of European films."
(Here’s wondering if movies that open in June fall into some sort of European Film Academy black hole, thus becoming ineligible for the awards.)
In any case, Helen Mirren, Forrest Whitaker, et al. will have to wait until 2007.
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