Levante/Power Alley by Lillah Halla (Brazil, France, Uruguay, 2023) is the winner of the main competition Mostra Concorso of the 42nd edition of Bergamo Film Meeting. Chosen by the audience, the film will receive the Bergamo Film Meeting Prize, worth 5,000 €.
The international jury, composed of Michelangelo Frammartino (director), Vaida Kazlauskaitė (project coordinator European Film Forum Scanorama – Vilnius) and Paola Raiman (film critic, member of the selection committee at the Entrevues Belfort Film Festival) decided to award the Best Direction Prize, worth 2,000 € to Até que a Música Pare/Until the Music Is Over by Cristiane Oliveira (Brazil, Italy, 2023).
The audience has also awarded the Close up section CGIL Prize (2,000 €) to the documentary The Golden Thread by Nishtha Jain (India, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Netherlands, Norway, UK, 2022). The Prize – La Sortie de l’Usine of the CGIL jury, decided by the union delegates of CGIL Bergamo (1,000 €), goes to Når vandene deles/Murky Waters by Martin B. Gulnov (Denmark, 2023).
The 43rd edition of Bergamo Film Meeting will take place from March 8 to 16, 2025.
COMPETITION EXHIBITION
FIRST PRIZE BERGAMO FILM MEETING
- Levante/Power Alley
- by Lillah Halla (Brazil, France, Uruguay, 2023)
- On the eve of a future-defining championship, promising volleyball player Sofia (17) is faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Seeking an illegal termination, she becomes the target of a fundamentalist group determined to stop her at any cost – but neither Sofia nor those who love her are willing to surrender to the blind fervour of the swarm.
SECOND PRIZE BERGAMO FILM MEETING
- Valami madarak/Some Birds
- by Dániel Hevér (Hungary, 2023)
- Béla feels like the world is conspiring against him when his son places him in a nursing home. Here, he crosses paths with a rebellious teenager Zoé, who has been sentenced to community service. While Zoé desperately tries to connect with her single mother, Béla wants to prove to everyone that he can live independently so that he can go home. Despite the almost sixty-year gap between them, their similarities and loneliness turn them into allies. A friendship transcending age barriers.
THIRD PRIZE BERGAMO FILM MEETING
- The Wall
- by Philippe Van Leeuw (Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Usa, 2023)
- Jessica Comley is an American agent of the U.S. Border Patrol on the Arizona-Mexico border. In this unforgiving desert, she is proud and determined to defend America against drug traffickers and illegal immigrants by any means necessary. But her relentless pushing of the limits leads to one of her interventions going awry when she kills a harmless migrant in front of three witnesses: her colleague, and a Native American with his grandson. Faced with the authorities, it is her word against theirs.
BEST DIRECTOR AWARD
- Até que a Música Pare/Until the Music Is Over
- by Cristiane Oliveira (Brazil, Italy, 2023)
- Chiara is the matriarch of an Italian-descendant family torn apart. After her youngest son moves out, she decides to go along with Alfredo, her husband, on his trips as a salesman in the bars of Serra Gaúcha. Their trust in each other breaks down when Chiara finds out about Alfredo’s life on the road and he realizes she hides something. A turtle and decks of cards will put to the test their 50-years relationship.
The jury decided to award the prize for best direction of the 42nd edition of the Bergamo Film Meeting. The jury said that: «Cristiane Oliveira conceives an unprecedented slow road movie: an elderly couple and a water tortoise aboard a familiar old Ford del Rey move along the border between Brazil and Argentina, between linguistic resonances from lands far apart (Portuguese mixed with Venetian dialect) in an imbalance between real locations and bodies, on the one hand, and fiction, on the other. Until the Music is Over is a journey between historical truth and magical-religious suspension, in a world that is familiar and stranger to us at the same time, and that ultimately intercepts life in its purity».
CGIL PRIZE
- The Golden Thread
- by Nishtha Jain (India, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Netherlands, Norway, UK, 2022)
- In the heyday of the jute industry, millions of people in Bengal made their living doing this laborious work, which has hardly changed since the industrial revolution. The 100-year-old machinery has been endlessly repaired. State aid kept this sustainable alternative to plastic going, but its future looks bleak. Along endless rows of antique looms, the air thick with dusty fibers, workers carry out their routine work. Accidents and jammed machines are commonplace; workers’ faces reveal the exhaustion of a lifetime of labor.
CGIL PRIZE JURY – “LA SORTIE DE L’USINE”
- Når vandene deles/Murky Waters
- by Martin B. Gulnov (Denmark, 2023)
- In an attempt to assist and rescue refugees arriving on the island of Lesbos in 2015, Mo Abassi winds up being arrested and accused of human trafficking. Through numerous meetings with his defense attorney, Mo is forced to account for every step and action made by him and his team of volunteers. As we witness the actual events leading up to the arrest Mo’s attorney becomes increasingly worrisome regarding critical but unaccountable pieces of evidence.
The CGIL jury has therefore decided to award the „La Sortie de l’Usine” Prize for the Close Up section of BFM 42. The jury said that: «”He who saves one life saves the whole world”;… this film confronts us with the need not to leave this task to a few people, with the responsibility not to allow those who – like the protagonist – leave their work and family to follow the call of solidarity to be criminalized and isolated in the general tendency to removaland disillusionment. Let us make memory and solidarity a common commitment».
The 42nd edition of the Bergamo Film Meeting (March 11 – 19) was ushered in by a special event. On Friday, March 8, the Ex Chiesa di Sant’Agostino hosted Gary Lucas plays Luis Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador, an appointment that was see the celebrated guitarist live score, in Italian premiere, Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece.
During the 9 days of programming, the festival proposed 160 works including feature films, documentaries and short films, divided as follows: 2 competitive sections, COMPETITION EXHIBITION reserved to fiction feature films, and CLOSE UP dedicated to documentary; the focus on contemporary European cinema through the EUROPE, NOW! section, presented for the first time in Italy the complete works of Frederikke Aspöck (Denmark), Lukas Moodysson (Sweden) and Metod Pevec (Slovenia), enriched by a selection of diploma films from European film schools that adhere to CILECT – in collaboration with Civica Scuola di Cinema Luchino Visconti di Milano – and by Europe, Now! Film Industry Meetings, two professional days (12 – 13 March); the ANIMATION CINEMA with Gerações X\Y, an overview of trends in Portuguese animation through the eyes of some of the representatives of the new generations of animators (Laura Gonçalves, Alexandra Ramires, David Doutel e Vasco Sá, Marta Monteiro, João Gonzalez) whose complete filmographies was featured; an extensive RETROSPECTIVE of Éric Rohmer (1920-2010), French director, screenwriter, editor and film critic among the leading figures of the Nouvelle Vague; the TRIBUTE to Sacha Guitry (1885-1957), the prolific and brilliant, actor, screenwriter, playwright and director, among the most fascinating and versatile personalities of 20th-century French theatre and cinema; the passing of the baton with Bergamo Jazz; the live score with guitars by Xavier Courtet and Julien Coulon of 10 short films made by Émile Cohl; the KINO CLUB section, dedicated to young spectators of all ages; the collaborations with the festivals Cinanima in Espinho (Portugal) and Immaginare ORLANDO (Bergamo); the Incontri: Cinema e Arte Contemporanea section, curated by The Blank, which this year featured the Greek artist and filmmaker Janis Rafa; as well as previews, special screenings and the DAILY STRIP, the appointment with some of the best illustrators of the Italian comics scene.