The 82nd Venice Film Festival awards ceremony was held on Saturday evening at 7 p.m. The Silent Friend won six awards in Venice, the award for best emerging actor and the International Federation of Film Critics Award went to Ildikó Enyedi’s film.
The Golden Bear-winning and Oscar-nominated director of Body and Soul, Ildikó Enyedi’s new film, The Silent Friend, the female lead Luna Wedler, won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for best emerging actor.
The film took home five additional awards on the day of its world premiere yesterday, the FIPRESCI, INTERFILM, student jury awards, the Oedipus Sustainability Award, and the Green Drop Award. The film is a sensitive and philosophical work that draws a parallel between the relationship between plants and humans. An emotional journey through time, spiced with some humor.
SILENT FRIEND is scheduled to be released in cinemas across Europe this winter, and is distributed by Mozinet in Hungary.
“I have never worked in such special circumstances before, it was a real gift. Ildikó created a secret, safe world. She is very intuitive and really pays attention to her colleagues. The film has made me respect nature much more than before,” said Luna Wedler about the award.
“I first met Luna Wedler in connection with My Wife’s Story. She was the first of the seven young, talented actresses I wanted to see. I stopped work in the middle of the casting and asked Luna for the role, and I canceled the other auditions. I think that says everything about the elemental talent, strength, and brilliance that radiates from her. She also works fantastically disciplined and has a frenetic sense of humor… it is wonderful to work with her,” said Ildikó Enyedi, the film’s director.
Philosophy… “In The Silent Friend, an old tree stands in the middle of a botanical garden. It is lonely, like the other inhabitants of the garden – thousands of kilometers away from their original habitat, so that we can admire and observe them. As we observe them, they observe us. They witness our short, tangled, noisy, and troubled lives. The film tells three stories, three hesitant encounters between man and plant, when these two radically different perceptions are truly connected for a moment. Our human heroes, like the plants in the garden, are outsiders, lonely souls. And they yearn for connection just as they do.”
American director and screenwriter Alexander Payne was the president of the jury, and the members included French director Stéphane Brizé, Italian filmmaker Maura Delpero, Romanian screenwriter and producer Cristian Mungiu, Iranian director Mohammed Raszulof, as well as Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres and Chinese film actress Zhao Tao.
Update riport: Aggie Reiter
Rolling in Budapest 