'Banel & Adama,' 'Hello Dankness' Top Melbourne Film Festival Winners

On the ultimate weekend of a bustling 18-day occasion, the in-person version of this 12 months’s Melbourne Movie Competition has drawn to an in depth with an awards ceremony that noticed a whopping $300,000 AUD (over $191,000 USD) in prize cash handed out throughout six classes. The most important particular person award of $140,000 AUD (almost $90,000 USD) was offered to the winner of the fest’s worldwide Vivid Horizons competitors: “Banel & Adama,” an arresting debut function by Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy.

It’s a notable coup for a small-scale rural love story that turned heads — however received no prizes — when it premiered in Competitors on the Cannes Movie Competition in Could, and continues to be searching for distribution within the U.S. and different main territories. Reviewing the movie out of Cannes, Selection critic Jessica Kiang counseled the “subtly seductive energy” of a “hanging debut [that] revolves with swish poetry across the interior experiences of a curious, unknowable girl.”

Its win got here in opposition to formidable competitors within the Vivid Horizons choice, together with such buzzy titles as Molly Manning Walker’s Cannes Un Sure Regard winner “The best way to Have Intercourse” and Phạm Thiên Ân’s haunting debut “Contained in the Yellow Cocoon Shell” — which, again on the Croisette, beat “Banel & Adama” to the Digital camera d’Or prize.

Collectively chairing the jury had been musician and filmmaker Saul Williams and his co-director Anisia Uzeyman, who received final 12 months’s inaugural Vivid Horizons award with their ingenious Afro-futurist imaginative and prescient “Neptune Frost”; their fellow jurors included filmmakers Alexandre O. Philippe (“78/52,” “Lynch/Oz”), Anthony Chen (“Ilo Ilo,” “The Breaking Ice”) and Kamila Andini (“The Seen and Unseen,” “Yuni”). In a collective assertion, they described Sy’s debut as “a movie that speaks on to the instances with a cinematic language and panorama that challenges and confronts whereas drawing you into its immense magnificence” and “a mysterious and robust first movie from a younger filmmaker with vivid horizons.”

They additional supplied a particular point out to a different feminine filmmaker, Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés, whose freewheeling household drama “Tótem” was a critics’ favorite on the Berlinale in February (earlier than being quite surprisingly shut out by Kristen Stewart’s jury). “The wealthy subtleties and nuance of this round story attracts us in and makes us part of its household,” the Melbourne jury acknowledged.

Williams and Uzeyman’s jury additionally decided the Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award — a $70,000 AUD (almost $45,000 USD) prize restricted to homegrown expertise — to avant-garde sibling filmmakers Dominique and Dan Angeloro, professionally referred to as Soda Jerk.

Already celebrated on the experimental scene for such sample-based works as “Terror Nullius” and “After the Rainbow,” they’ve been touring the pageant circuit over the previous 12 months with their newest “Hiya Dankness,” a swirling visible essay that displays on Trumpism, COVID and different current sociopolitical issues through multimedia fragments that vary from “Wayne’s World” to Reddit. The jury known as it “a clear-eyed, sharply satirical tackle certainly one of America’s most troubling chapters, transformative use of current footage, and groundbreaking manipulation thereof.” “Hiya Dankness” will obtain a restricted Stateside launch on September 8.

The First Nations Movie Artistic Award, for excellent filmmaking and storytelling expertise from Australia’s First Nations inhabitants, was offered to Adrian Russell Wills and Gillian Moody’s documentary “Kindred,” an autobiographical reflection on Aboriginal youngsters faraway from their beginning households.

One other native documentary, in the meantime, took each the pageant’s much-contested Viewers Award and its Youth Jury Award: Thomas Charles Hyland’s auspiciously titled “This Is Going to Be Huge,” a young portrait of a highschool for neurodivergent teenagers as they stage an formidable musical, proved a word-of-mouth crowdpleaser because the pageant unfolded. Thematically, it segued quite aptly into the night time’s Closing Gala, Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s Sundance-premiered comedy “Theater Camp.”

As a collective of winners, starting from daringly subversive esoterica to audience-friendly heartwarmers, it displays the unfold of an enormous, numerous pageant program (numbering 267 movies this 12 months) that additionally noticed recent improvements in its retrospective sections. Months after her loss of life in February, a profession tribute to groundbreaking Senegalese docmaker Safi Faye — the primary girl from sub-Saharan Africa ever to direct a commercially distributed function — launched legions of cinephiles to her under-seen work.

A brand new part, Vital Situation, invited worldwide critics mentoring on the pageant’s adjoining Critics’ Campus program for brand new writers to current a favourite basic or undervalued movie and average a post-screening dialogue to contextualize it for modern audiences. For this critic, attending to current Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s feverishly homoerotic swansong “Querelle” to a sold-out home — regardless of roaring competitors from crowds assembled for Australia’s quarter-final triumph within the soccer World Cup that very same night time — was the enduring pleasure of a pageant wealthy in revelations.