British Independent Film Awards - 2006 Winners
November 30th, 2006 by Andre Soares
There were numerous surprises at the 2006 British Independent Film Awards (Bifa) ceremony, which was held yesterday, Nov. 29, in West London.
Out of its six nominations, the unofficial favorite, Stephen Frears’s The Queen, about the battle of wills between Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) and Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) following Princess Diana’s death, won only one award — Best Screenplay for Peter Morgan, reprising his Venice Festival win. (Additionally, Helen Mirren was given the Variety UK Personality of the Year Award.)
Instead, the surprise Best Independent British Film winner was This Is England, Shane Meadows’s semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about a young man’s indoctrination into the world of skinhead gangs in the England of the 1980s. The film also won the Best Promising Newcomer (On-Screen) Award for 12-year-old Thomas Turgoose as the pre-teen-turned-skin. Earlier this fall, This Is England won the Special Jury Prize at the 1st RomeFilmFest.
Beating the once unbeatable Helen Mirren, stage actress Kate Dickie took the Best Actress award for her feature-film debut as a Glasgow surveillance camera operator pursuing an ex-con in Andrea Arnold’s British-Danish psychological thriller Red Road. (By the way, Arnold’s film won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival earlier this year.)
In the Best Actor category, Dickie’s co-star Tony Curran beat the other unbeatable acting nominee, Peter O’Toole, who plays an old and frail but ever-horny actor in Roger Michell’s Venus. (O’Toole was deemed unbeatable less because of his performance — in this writer’s view a very minor one — than because of his nearly half-century film career.)
Best Independent Foreign Film was Michael Haneke’s first-rate Caché / Hidden, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as a bourgeois Parisian couple whose complacent lives are dramatically altered by an event in the far-away past. (Among the losers was Pedro Almodóvar’s equally first-rate Volver.)
Among the other winners were veteran Leslie Phillips, 82, chosen Best Supporting Actor/Actress for hamming it up as O’Toole’s actor buddy in Venus; Best Director Kevin Macdonald for The Last King of Scotland, a fictitious tale about the relationship between a Scottish doctor and the deranged Uganda leader Idi Amin (nominee Forest Whitaker); and, curiously, Best Documentary The Road to Guantanamo. Somehow, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s docudrama has been fooling some into believing it is an actual depiction of the fate of three Englishmen of Pakistani ancestry at the American Gulag.
The UK Film Council is Bifa’s biggest funder.
Full list of winners and nominees at the 2006 British Independent Film Awards
THE CONVERSATION (1974): DVD Review
Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival Awards - 2006
Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival 2006 Winners
Independent Spirit 2006 Nominees
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