Swiss Film Awards - 2006 Winners
by Andre Soares
The 10th Swiss Film Awards were announced this past Wed., Jan. 24, at the 42nd Solothurn Film Festival.
Fredi M. Murer’s Vitus (top), which made it to the semi-final phase for this year’s best foreign-language film Academy Award, was picked as best Swiss film of 2006. Vitus, the story of a reluctant piano prodigy and his grandfather, stars Teo Gheorghiu and Bruno Ganz. It has sold nearly 200,000 tickets since its release in German-speaking Switzerland last year.
The best documentary winner was Heidi Specogna’s Das Kurze Leben des José Antonio Gutierrez / The Brief Life of José Antonio Gutierrez, about a Guatemalan street kid who, after immigrating to the United States, joins the U.S. marine corps hoping to gain U.S. citizenship but ends up as the first dead U.S. soldier in the Iraq War.
The best film and best documentary awards are each worth SFr60,000 (US$48,000).
Screenwriter-director Andrea Štaka received the best screenplay award — given for the first time — for Das Fräulein (left), about a Serbian immigrant (Marija Skaricic) living in Zurich who befriends another immigrant from the Balkans (Mirjana Karanovic, the outstanding lead in Grbavica).
Das Fräulein had previously won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival and the Heart of Sarajevo at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
Jean-Luc Bideau was chosen best performer in a leading role (the Swiss Film Awards have no best actor/best actress division) in Jean-Stéphane Bron’s comedy Mon frère se marie / My Brother Is Getting Married, about a dysfunctional family’s attempts to seem functional for a wedding ceremony. Natacha Koutchoumov was best supporting performer in Pas de panique / No Panic.
Also of interest, the most successful 2006 Swiss releases were Michael Steiner’s Grounding and Bettina Oberli’s Die Herbstzeitlosen / Late Bloomers / Little Paris (above), each with 400,000 admissions sold. (For comparison’s sake, the most successful Swiss film ever is the 1978 comedy Die Schweizermacher, with nearly one million admissions.) Grounding is a drama about how the demise of Swissair affected the people of Switzerland, while Die Herbstzeitlosen revolves around four elderly women (Stephanie Glaser, Heidi Maria Glössner, Monica Gubser, and Annemarie Düringer) who scandalize their little town when they decide to turn a local shop into a chic lingerie store.
Swiss productions nabbed 10% of the local box office, up from 6% in 2005. U.S. productions dominated the market (60% of box-office revenues), followed by French (8.7%), British (8.3%), and German films (6%).
The Swiss Film Awards are organized by the Swiss Federal Culture Office, in association with Swiss Films, SRG SSR idée suisse, the Locarno International Film Festival, the Nyon documentary film festival (Visions du Réel), and the Solothurn Film Festival.
The Solothurn festival continues until Jan. 28.
Source for Swiss box-office figures: Swissinfo.com
Full list of 2006 Swiss Film Award winners and nominees
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