2006 European Film Awards Winners
The European Film Academy, whose awards ceremony was held this evening in Warsaw, has opted for conventionality by giving its best European film award to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives of Others, a Cold War spy-thriller-cum-melodrama lacking both thrills and drama.
Additionally, The Lives of Others star Ulrich Mühe (above, top photo), the one saving grace in the film, received the best European actor award for his role as a Stasi spy who, while eavesdropping on a playwright in the mid-1980s, begins to question both his personal ethics and his allegiance to the Communist Party. In real life, Mühe, a renowned stage actor since the 1980s, was himself spied on by East Germany’s fearsome state police.
The Lives of Others became the third German film in the last four years to win the top European Film Award, following Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! in 2003 and Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand / Head-On in 2004.
Pedro Almodóvar’s funny and touching Volver (above, lower photo), a rare example of intelligent and creative filmmaking, won four European Academy awards: best director, best actress for Penélope Cruz (Helen Mirren was not in the running), best cinematographer for José Luis Alcaine (tied with Barry Ackroyd for Ken Loach’s Irish guerrilla drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley), and best composer for Alberto Iglesias, whose marvelous score sounds like the offspring of Bernard Herrmann’s and Max Steiner’s music.
Additionally, Volver took the People’s Choice Award for best film.
Upon accepting his best director trophy, Almodóvar declared, "It was a very important experience for me to go back to the tiny place where I was born. I dedicate this award to the wonderful actresses who represented the women who surrounded me when I was a child." (Volver’s female cast won an ensemble best actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Almodóvar was given the best screenplay award.)
Fighting back tears, best actress Penélope Cruz told her director, "Thank you so much for giving me the chance to play this part. You have changed my career and my life."
Cruz, outstanding as Volver’s sensual and vulnerable latter-day Anna Magnani, trying to cope with both ghosts of the past and a "ghost" in the present, is one of the leading candidates for the 2006 best actress Academy Award.
Among the other winners were:
- Georgian filmmaker Géla Babluani’s well-crafted but exploitative 13 (Tzameti), which took home the European Discovery Award;
- Philip Gröning’s Die Grosse Stille / Into Great Silence (above), about life inside the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery of the reclusive Carthusian Order in France, which had been previously announced as the best documentary winner;
- Philippe Garrel’s Les Amants réguliers / Regular Lovers, a Nouvelle Vague-ish look into the life of a Parisian student and revolutionary (played by the director’s son, Louis Garrel), which received the FIPRESCI (International Film Critics) Award;
- Pierre Pell and Stéphane Rozenbaum, who were handed an award for "artistic contribution" for the production design in Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep. (Previous years’ technical/craft categories were condensed into one single category this year.)
Additionally, the European Achievement in World Cinema 2006 Award was given to British producer Jeremy Thomas, whose latest films include Fast Food Nation and Tideland, while French-born, Polish-raised filmmaker and actor Roman Polanski received the European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award. (I’m assuming it was no coincidence that Polanski was chosen to receive that honor in the year the European Film Academy held their awards ceremony in Poland, the first such event to take place in a country from the former Soviet Bloc.)
"It’s a moving moment for me to receive this award, particularly in Warsaw," Polanski said. "Only good things happen to me in this city."
Quotes via Reuters / Adelaide Now.
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Tags: European Film Awards, Film Awards, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Géla Babluani, Into Great Silence, Pedro Almodóvar, Penélope Cruz, Philip Gröning, Roman Polanski, The Lives of Others, Ulrich Mühe, Volver
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I am so glad Ms. Cruz won that much deserved award, I think she’s matured and has a lot of potential as an actress, “Volver” was a very interesting and passionate movie. I haven’t seen the german movie “The Life Of Others”, I hope it shows up the movie theathers of my Florida community, they sure need more foreign movies around here. Great site btw!