Thursday, 28 October 2010 09:17
Icy Russian Arctic drama How I Ended This Summer won the top prize at the London Film Festival on Wednesday, and British director Clio Barnard took two awards for her innovative drama-documentary The Arbor.
Actress Patricia Clarkson, who headed the best-film judging panel, praised Alexei Popogrebsky's "visceral psychological drama" about two meteorologists who clash at a remote polar research station. How I Ended This Summer was "a cinematic tour de force... tense, moving and universal in its scope," she said.
The Russian film beat a shortlist that included ballet thriller Black Swan, Academy Award-tipped drama The King's Speech" and the Cannes Film Festival top prize-winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
The 54-year-old London festival introduced a best-film prize last year as part of a bid to boost its profile and compete with better-known events in Berlin, Venice and Toronto.
The festival's awards were handed out at a black-tie dinner ceremony in London's 18th-century St. Luke's church. Among those attending was director Martin Scorsese, who paid tribute to the work of the festival organizer, the British Film Institute, in preserving old movies.
Barnard won the best debut feature and best British newcomer awards for The Arbor, an innovative docudrama about the short life and troubled legacy of working-class playwright Andrea Dunbar.
Barnard interviewed family and friends of Dunbar, who stormed the theatre scene in the 1980s with savagely funny plays about northern English life, but died of a brain hemorrhage in 1990 at age 29. On-screen the words are lip-synched by actors, creating a hybrid of drama and documentary that won praise from critics and audiences.
The festival's artistic director, Sandra Hebron, called it "a challenging, moving and utterly memorable film."
The Grierson prize for documentary, named for Canada's National Film Board pioneer John Grierson, went to Armadillo, Janus Metz's film about Danish soldiers in Afghanistan.