Smile, you won: Tom Hardy as Charles Bronson on Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson
The Motherland took the cake for the second in as many years of the Sydney Film Festival Official Competition — and once again, it was a Hollywood tough guy’s namesake in the spotlight. Following director Steve McQueen’s 2008 win for Hunger, this year’s Blue Pavlova and a cool $60,000 were awarded last night to the stylish British biopic Bronson — about a man who assumes the name of Charles Bronson.
Said Jury President Rolf de Heer: “The film that has been selected by the jury of the Sydney Film Prize as best demonstrating the competition’s criteria of emotional power and resonance, audacity, cutting-edge, courage and going beyond the usual treatment of its subject matter is Bronson.”
In the audience, surprise seemed to mingle with applause at the announcement. While Bronson is undoubtedly a visually dynamic film, the Sydney crowd may have been punting on one of the three local films in competition. And with the colourful screenwriter Brock Norman Brock no longer in town, a glitzy photo-op was missed as the honour of accepting the award went to a gracious representative from Madman.
But all was definitely not lost for the local industry. Khoa Do’s ambitious Missing Water was the runner-up of sorts, winning the Community Relations Commission $5,000 prize for a film portraying cross-cultural and migration issues. And in its inaugural year, the FOXTEL documentary prize was doubled to $20,000 in order to award two films: Contact, by Bentley Dean and Martin Butler, and Safina Uberoi’s A Good Man.
NSW Premier and Minister for the Arts Nathan Rees also came with good news for the film community: an extra $5 million earmarked for Screen NSW’s production fund. The announcement went down well with the closing night crowd, who also applauded enthusiastically for the rest of the other award recipients.
An Education
And yet, despite all the love for the local industry, this year’s Sydney Film Festival was quite the British affair — it opened with Ken Loach’s Looking For Eric, awarded Bronson the official prize and finally closed with a Nick Hornby-penned film, An Education. Admittedly, Danish filmmaker and festival jurist, Lone Scherfig, directed the film, but it is a quintessentially English coming of age story about a girl deciding between an education in love or Oxford.
Full of wit, humour and marvellous performances, including the stand out lead actress Carey Mulligan and Emma Thompson in winning form, An Education delighted the closing night crowd. Indeed the film was perfect for the festival audience: well crafted and funny, with a trip to Paris and just the right amount of sexual impropriety.
For a full list of winners, click here
.
