Singing of an Icelandic lullaby, a mass toast with Icelandic schnapps brennivín and announcing of the best films wrapped up the jubilee 20th edition of Motovun Film Festival. The main award, Propeller of Motovun for Best Film in the main competition program, went to the German film Western by Valeska Grisebach, which also won the FIPRESCI jury award. The award for the best film in Motovun Shorts program went to Written/Unwritten.

With a majority of, the main international jury (Hrvoje Hribar, Oliver Frljić, Maša Aljehina, Rumena Bužarovska and Anna María Karlsdóttir) decided to give the Propeller of Motovun to the film Western. Here is their explanation: It is a film that relies on nature. The human nature, to be exact. A film that tends to trust life, not prejudices and conditioned expectations. A film that intentionally fails to follow the pattern it itself has established by using the name of a famous genre as its title. No notion of the past is reliable today. This also refers to the notions of big and small, of civilized and backward, of cowboys and Indians, of horses, of women. None is as unreliable as the notion of men’s games. A film for those who can still be surprised by life.

The international jury of critics, consisting of Petra Meterc, Mario Slugan and Tadeusz Szczepanski, also pronounced Western the best film. This is how they explained it: The FIPRESCI Prize goes to Western by Valeska Grisebach, for using and twisting genre conventions in order to discuss complex topics, for being able to use a very few words to do it, for constantly dancing on the edge and never tripping and, last but not least, for a naturalistic representation of a meeting of two worlds that refuses to succumb to stereotypes.

The best film in the Motovun Shorts program, as selected by the last year’s winner Emmanuel Tenenbaum, is the Romanian film Written/Unwritten, directed by Adrian Silisteanu. The film also won a cash award in the amount of EUR 1,000, sponsored by Irish whiskey Jameson.