Editor

Copenhagen International Film Festival’s prize for Best Female Director has now been named the Alice Award.

The award is named after the first Danish female sound film director, Alice O´Fredericks (1900-1968) who made her debut as a director in 1934 and continued to work energetically until one year before she died. She has created some of the greatest Danish family films and will be remembered for Fy & Bi, the cherished Far til Fire-movies and the adaptations of Morten Korch’s novels. Moreover, she will be remembered for the first Danish films about women and women’s rights like We Meet at Tove’s from 1946 and The Burning Question from 1943 about the right to have an abortion. She is Denmark’s most productive film director and her film The Red Horses is to date the greatest Danish audience success.

The Alice Award was established in cooperation with WIFT (Women in Film and Television) and will be awarded to the best film made by a female director.

The intention with this award is to draw attention to the imbalance between the number of male and female film directors, especially in other European countries than Denmark. Denmark has many good female directors, but here, too, most films are directed by men. Thus, in 2005, only one in 31 Danish films had a female director.

”We sometimes believe that things have changed so much, but when we look at these numbers they speak for themselves. Women have come a long way, but not yet long enough”, says festival director Janne Giese.

Gender is not necessarily important for the stories being told, but, at their best, films work as stories in which we reflect ourselves. Not only do they mirror our culture, but they influence it as well. If we are to ensure female role models in films and female influence in cultural development, one way to do this is to promote more female film directors. An award alone will not do the job, but it can help to make talented female artists more visible in the international film environment and hopefully inspire other women.

The eight films that are nominated for this year’s Alice Award have been selected across the different themes and will be judged by an individual Danish jury featuring men and women from the film industry and leading personalities in Danish cultural life.

The nominees for this year’s Alice Awards are:
The Secret Life of Words - Isabel Coixet
Barakat! - Djamila Sahraoui
Longing - Valeska Grisebach
On Fire - Claire Simon
Fresh Air - Ágnes Kocsis
Close to Home - Dalia Hager & Vidi Bilu
Don't Tell - Christina Comencini
Ryna - Ruxandra Zenide