Georgian writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili's first feature film "Beginning" triumphed at Spain's San Sebastian International Film Festival, scooping up four of its top prizes including best film and best director.
The story about a community of Jehovah's Witnesses in a isolated village in Georgia amid the aftermath of an extremist attack also won best screenplay and best actress for Ia Sukhitashvili in the awards ceremony Saturday night.
"Beginning," a Franco-Georgian co-production directed by the 34-year-old Kulumbegashvili, was originally set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which was cancelled due to the pandemic.
The San Sebastian festival in northern Spain went ahead but under coronavirus distancing restrictions, including showing fewer films and having reduced occupancy for theaters.
The best actor award was shared by the male ensemble of Thomas Vinterberg's "Another Round," composed of Mads Mikkelsen, Magnus Millang, Lars Ranthe and Thomas Bo Larsen.
Johnny Depp's production of "Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan," a music documentary about the singer of the Irish punk band The Pogues, took the Special Jury Prize.
U.S. actor and film director Viggo Mortensen received the Donostia Award for his contribution to cinema.
Kulumbegashvili said she hopes the success of her film is an inspiration to other directors just starting out, saying that all the people who told her in the financing process that she had to do it a certain way, different than she had planned, were wrong.
"We were very stubborn, and this shows you need to believe and do everything you need to for your film," she said. "I hope it serves as an example for other directors working on their first features that go through rejection just like I did. It forms part of the normal process."
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More