San Sebastian Film Festival Awards – 2007 Winners
Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the Golden Shell for Best Film at this year’s edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Written by Yiyun Li from her own short story, Wang’s film depicts the difficult relationship between a Beijing widower and his recently divorced daughter living in the US. As the widower, American performer Henry O, 79, was given the Silver Shell for Best Actor.
"It was a small film that needed a lot of time to be done because I think films need to breathe, like us," Wang, 58, remarked. "Not every story has to have Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie."
The jury was presided by author and director Paul Auster, with whom Wang had previously worked on the meandering 1995 dramatic comedy Smoke and its sequel, Blue in the Face. The duo reportedly had a falling out a few years later while working on another project.
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers was also the top pick of the World Catholic Association for Communication and of the Spanish Film Critics.
The Special Jury Award went to 18-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf’s feature-film debut, Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, the tale of a six-year-old Afghan girl who wants to go to school despite opposition from traditionalists in that rabidly patriarchal society. Jury members were impressed with the film’s "exquisite cinematography and the remarkable performance by the child actress Nikbakht Noruz. A promising debut by a filmmaker who we hope will go on to create important works in the future."
Nick Broomfield won the best director prize for the British Iraq war drama Battle for Haditha, the story of the 2005 slaughter of 24 Iraqi civilians by US marines.
"I think this film can play a role, provide information at a time when there is very little information coming out of Iraq that is not from official sources," Broomfield stated at the Battle for Haditha screening. "This is a war with very little information."
Blanca Portillo, best known internationally for her role as the woman dying of cancer in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, was chosen best actress for her performance as a morally conflicted ex-con in Gracia Querejeta’s Seven Billiard Tables. Querejeta and co-screenwriter David Planell shared the screenwriting award with John Sayles for Honeydripper, the story of a nightclub owner who must fight the system in 1950s Alabama in order to keep his club going.
According to John Hopewell’s report for Variety, "San Sebastian jury decisions are often stomped by the local press. So jury chairman Paul Auster pulled off something of a feat … by drawing strong applause from Spanish critics for almost all plaudits." (A feat indeed, but Auster shouldn’t have led the jury when a film by friend/foe Wang was in competition.)
Nadine Labaki’s French-Lebanese beauty salon drama Caramel (above) won both the Audience and the Youth awards, while the International Film Critics choice was Anahí Berneri’s Argentinian drama Encarnación, which follows an aging, fading actress who travels to the countryside. Julian Schnabel’s tedious (though, admittedly, well-received) French-made drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the real-life struggles of stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby, was the Audience Award runner-up.
David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, the festival’s opening night gala film — and perhaps the most high-profile entry in the official selection — came out empty-handed. ("An absence as ridiculous as it is understandable," wrote E. Rodríguez Marchante in the Spanish newspaper ABC (Google translation), adding "it’s a Cronenberg film, so why bother giving it any awards?")
Conrad Clark’s Anglo-Chinese co-production Soul Carriage, about a young man whose boss orders him to take care of the dead body of a co-worker, received the Altadis New Directors Award, while Enrique Fernández and César Charlone’s Uruguayan comedy The Pope’s Toilet, about the furor caused by the pope’s visit to a small Uruguayan town, received the Horizontes Award for Best Iberian/Ibero-American film.
Richard Gere, 58, and Liv Ullmann, 69, were honored with the Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award. (Donostia is the Basque name for San Sebastian.)
"We’ve lost two of the greatest film directors, [Ingmar] Bergman and [Michelangelo] Antonioni — both died this summer — and those two people did much more for the world with their cinema than the majority of politicians," Ullmann remarked at a press conference. "It’s thanks to them that I’m proud to make movies."
Ullmann added that she and Bergman had "a magnificent relationship for 40 years, a friendship, and he’s the father of my child." According to a moncinema.ca report (Google translation), the (Tokyo-born) Norwegian actress-director was visibly moved and was warmly applauded by the journalists present.
The 2007 edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival also included a comprehensive retrospective of director Henry King’s career, ranging from his early silents — Tol’able David, Stella Dallas, The Winning of Barbara Worth — to his lengthy stint at 20th Century-Fox, where he was one of the studio’s top directors from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s.
Henry King’s films, in fact, served as launching pads and/or major career boosts for the likes of Tyrone Power (In Old Chicago, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Jesse James, The Black Swan, etc.), Alice Faye (In Old Chicago, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Little Old New York), Jennifer Jones (The Song of Bernadette, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing), Gregory Peck (Twelve O’Clock High, The Gunfighter, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, etc.), and Susan Hayward (I’d Climb the Highest Mountain, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, David and Bathsheba).
And the last word goes to Hana Makhmalbaf:
"Thank you very much," the young filmmaker said upon accepting her award. "I was just thinking that if cinema and poetry didn’t exist the world would only be violence."
San Sebastian Film Festival Awards – 2007
San Sebastian Film Festival 2007 – Official Selection
Henry King Retrospective at the 2007 San Sebastian Film Festival
San Sebastian Film Festival 2007 – Zabaltegi (New Directors) Sidebar
San Sebastian Film Festival 2007 Gala Screenings
Middle East Film Festival 2007 – Documentary/Short Film Line-Up
Middle East Film Festival 2007 – Official Competition Line-Up
Toronto Film Festival Awards – 2007 Winners
San Sebastian Film Festival Awards – 2006 Winners
San Sebastian International Film Festival 2005 winners
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