AwardsWatch

The international jury of the fifteenth Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra, made up of Nicole Brenez, James Lattimer and Antoine Thirion, after watching the entries in the Official Section, has decided to award the following prizes:

Official prizes

► The Punto de Vista Grand Prize for Best Film, worth 10,000 euros, goes to The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), by C.W. Winter and Anders Edström.

The jury stresses that “It's a monumental film, but a very humble one”. And says, “Visiting means seeing, and seeing often. At the centre of this film, there is a woman in grief, visited by many memories. There is a house, visited by many friends, neighbours and relatives. There is a field, which this woman takes care of, no matter what. And a landscape from which this film harvests images and sounds over the course of many seasons. By working this earth tirelessly, both this woman and the film make a world, and this world comes to bloom in the mind of the audience gathered for a day. During these times that keep people apart, this film keeps on struggling to maintain a connection between people and the world we're living in.”

► The Jean Vigo prize for Best Director, worth 5,000 euros, goes to Surviving You, Always by Morgan Quaintance. The jury stresses that it is “A film that marshals its many disparate elements into a mysterious, utterly singular whole, drawing on photos, celluloid, music and two texts running in parallel that are never afraid to pull in different directions at once, like a drug trip that dissociates mind from body, like a snake writhing inside the walls. A love story that is also a story of fear, paranoia and longing, while also functioning as an alternative history of the UK; there is no mention of politics here, but everything is in its coils.”


► The prize for Best Short, worth 3,000 euros, goes to Amaryllis - a Study, by Jayne Parker. The international jury describes this film as the point of view a director can convey regarding the world around us. “2020. Planet Earth is being suffocated by toxic clouds, viruses and injustices, it atrophies and collapses before our very eyes. What can cinema do? It can preserve the radiance of life and embalm it in its silvery medium, thank you for this gesture as necessary as it is elegant; beauty is politics.”



Special prizes

► The special audience prize for Best Film, worth 1,650 euros, goes to In Ictu Oculi (begiak hesteko artean) by Jorge Moneo Quintana.

► The Youth Prize for Best Film, worth 1,500 euros, goes to This Day Won’t Last, by Mouaad el Salem. The jury chose this film "For its honesty and because it has achieved a lot with few resources. This Day Won't Last is sure of itself: aware of its limits, it accepts them, plays with them and even makes a virtue of them. A dissatisfied film, it does not conform to any norms, either legal or formal, so breaking with the majority trends in experimental film. As the Youth Jury, we too share these limits. And also, in short, it's the film we liked the most."

► Special Jury Commendation (in the category of Best Film) for Bicentenario, by Pablo Álvarez Mesa. In the opinion of the jury this film is a “luminous spatial and spiritualistic journey”.

► Special Jury Commendation (in the category of Best Short) for Signal 8, by Simon Liu. “A glittering celluloid vision of Hong Kong that knows exactly when to linger and when to take flight, tapping into the nervous, yet still untainted mood of a city on the brink,” comments the jury.


X Films

► Finally, after due deliberation, the jury for the X FILMS PROJECT 2021 - Marta Ponsa and Ane Rodríguez Armendáriz – who found out about the three projects in writing and then at a public presentation by their authors –Tamara García, Irati Gorostidi and Elisa Celda – decided to select San Simón 62 by Irati Gorostidi, for the X Films Project, for revealing a little-known intrahistory of the region that expands the collective perception of a period from contemporary point of view. It does this through a narrative that places a specific setting as a witness to the life of spiritual communities. The author invokes the past through a collection of archive shots and testimony, while at the same time seeking the hidden traces left by these communities in the present.
In a way, San Simón 62 also reflects the approach to alternative lifestyles that spring up at times of crisis like the one we are currently experiencing.