Awards John Cleese, Cat Activists, Documentaries
Whenever my wife and I need a break (she from Netflix series, me from documentaries), we watch the Fawlty Towers series with John Cleese. His wife Sybil does what she can to make the hotel owner Basil (Cleese) behave but he can not resist to humiliate German guests – ”don’t mention the war”, she says, but he does – and the French get their treatment as well, when one of them complain about the wine. Hilarious. Still wonderful even if 40 years old.
John Cleese (photo), master of silly walking, got the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Film Festival the other day. So well deserved for his long contribution to film and television.
But many others got awards as well – I focus on documentaries and documentarians:
The Bulgarian cat activists (see post above) Mina Mileva and Vezela Kazakova got €6000, the Arte International Relations Cinelink Award for their project ”Cat in the Wall”, Macedonian producer Atanas Georgiev and his directors Ljubo Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska got €30.000 from TRT (Turkish Radio and Television) for their ”Honeyland” which is in post-production. I saw material from the film at the RoughCut Boutique, looked good, very promising. As is another one presented at the Boutique event, ”What Comes Around” by Reem Saleh, a close-up of a poor family in a poor district of Cairo. It got the Restart Award, €20.000 in kind support.
My friends in the documentary jury Gitte Hansen (First Hand Films) and Claas Danielsen (CEO of MDM in Leipzig) chose together with renowned Serbian director Zelimir Zilnik to play safe and go for both aesthetics and content with ”City of the Sun” by Rati Oneli from Georgia and ”Kinders” by Brothers Riahi from Austria/Iran. You can read about all the awards on link below.
http://www.sff.ba/en/news/10756/23rd-sarajevo-film-festival-awards