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Discover the award-winning films of the 5th Firenze Film Festival’s competition categories and learn more about all the inspiring filmmakers we featured this year.
Best Cinematographer Winner
Marana
In the Italian foothills, summer is almost over. Mirko and Max meet in the forest and wander in abandoned places, trying to imagine a possible future, while Giorgia and Lorenzo live timid moments of intimacy. In the background, a daily life of a community of teenagers with ASD, who manage to live in balance between real and fantastic, physical and metaphysical, fear and pleasure of getting lost. They live “outside” time, a condition that allows them to experience an ephemeral present made of discoveries, rituals and relationships. Marana is a journey into the world of autism, where the desires of youth are narrated without preconceptions and recorded in their simple becoming.
Giovanni Benini, Davide Provolo
Best Director Winner
Olvido & Leon
After fifteen years, Olvido has accepted that her problem is not her twin brother, León, who has Down Syndrome. She could abandon him, but she has accepted that her problem involves powers unknown to her which she cannot properly identify, although she senses their presence. Powers that weave, like a spider, a web of social and personal discontent.
XAVIER BERMÚDEZ
Best Editor Winner
Censor Of Dreams
Every night, The Censor and his team moderate Yoko’s dreams. Tonight nothing happens as planned.
Leo Berne, Raphaël Rodriguez
Best Experimental Winner
Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti
Currents / Perpendicolare Avanti is a camera-less| hand-made, 16mm film collage, based on the artist's autobiographical experience as an immigrant. The film explores the dynamics of inhabiting the in-between space of multiple countries and temporalities through visual and sound abstraction, interlacing and recycling pre-existing film materials and fragments of otherwise anonymous orphan films. Utilizing these so-called “scraps”, Currents is a film of extensive remediation, treated by hand through the use of the emulsion lifting technique, thereby re-imagining, re-constructing, and de-constructing the liminality of immigrant life. The re-writing of the self in Currents is produced through the archives of others, via associative montage and repeated performative acts on the surface of the film.
Federica Foglia
Best Feature Documentary Winner
Elias Is A Panther
“Elias Is A Panther” is a documentary about a boy, Timian, and his chronically ill brother, Elias. When Elias dies, Timian must tackle the pain of loss and his family’s grief. Timian will not talk about Elias’s illness and eventual death. He would rather be a tiger and play forever with Elias, a panther, in the jungle of his imagination.
Anita Aamodt Enersen, Nic Osborne
Best Feature Film Winner
The Perfect David
At sixteen, David is much like any teenager, but his boyish good looks rest upon a hulking, muscular body. His weightlifting obsession is driven by his mother Juana, a troubled artist whose only goal is to have her son reach physical perfection by his seventeenth birthday. With countless hours spent at a grungy gym in the company of a motley clique of pumped-up gym rats, David desperately searches for what it means to be a man. With his birthday approaching, Juana demands growth at any cost. Soon David’s cohorts offer him dangerous chemical shortcuts, sending the teen spiraling into a cycle of physical and emotional torment. Pushed in every direction by adults who only take and trapped inside a body that is growing to freakish proportions, David rages against this brutally imposed armor. And his only way out is to stop being perfect.
Felipe Gómez Aparicio
Best Producer Winner
The Bends
A mixed martial arts fighter discovers she’s pregnant in the lead-up to the most important fight of her career, in this AACTA-nominated Australian short film. A docu-drama hybrid propelled by a reticent yet affecting performance from pro-amateur MMA fighter Annie Thatcher, The Bends is an elevated, empathetic portrait of a person accustomed to pushing their body to its limit, but who now must choose between conquering it or keeping it safe for another.
Tom Campbell
Best Screenplay Winner
August Sky
As the Amazon burns for the seventeenth day, a nurse in Sao Paulo finds herself drawn to a neo-Pentecostal church.
Jasmin Tenucci
Best Short Documentary Winner
Turning Man – 81RPM
Jürgen Leppert, also known as "Der Dreher" or "der Kreisel" is a graduate engineer, speaker inventor, 360 degree dancer, gifted Frisbee player and thoroughbred 68er. Everything revolves around the Karlsruher legend, and not just on the dance floor. A declaration of love to music, dancing and rebellion. A portrait of a tough person who still swims against the stream and the living proof that 81 years is far from too old for hard raves.
Robin Trouillet
Best Short Film Winner
Il Fagotto – The Load
Denatality is making one town disappear. The Government is set pressing measures, not just psychological ones. Females who don’t contribute to the demographic future of the country are seen as a problem to resolve, thus every year they are called to declare to a Government Office the reason why they haven’t had any babies in the last twelve months. In an out of time world, that reminds us more with every passing day, Bianca and Vittoria are at the opposite angles of their fertility time. Their acquaintance forces them to choose in an instant the direction of their future: any choice will result in a radical change of their destiny.
Giulia Giapponesi
Best Student Film Winner
Body
A nameless mute appears in an empty field. The lonely widow materialized him from her thoughts to help her out on her farm. Over time, the mute quietly starts yearning to be loved. Once the widow’s son comes to visit, she hides her secret helper in the forest. Overwhelmed with longing, the mute disobeys.
Marijana Verhoef