Treeless Mountain Wins Natuzzi Prize

*** This Just In ***

Director So-yong Kim was announced as the winner of the Natuzzi International Award for Best Feature Film on the closing night of the 2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival.

For her film, Treeless Mountain, Kim won a cash prize of $25,000, beating out 12 competitors for the award, which is the first of its kind in Australia.

The seven-person jury, comprising key figures in the international film and art scene, was led by Jury President Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator of the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival

The 2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival has been judged a huge success with twenty two world premieres, including nine features and three documentary features, 62 Australian premieres and 143 films from 49 different countries screened over just 11 days.

The Film Festival has been visited and enjoyed by numerous well known players in the Australian film industry including Hugo Weaving, Natalie Imbruglia, Rolf de Heer, Scott Hicks, Bruce Beresford, Matt Day, Sarah Watt, William McInnes, Warwick Thornton, and Aden Young – to name just a few.

Attendances across the main screening program grew by 30% from 2007, with 18% of sessions SOLD OUT.

I myself managed to see 13 film out of a planned 15. In the end, for a variety or reasons, I was too exhausted to even consider attending my two scheduled screenings last Saturday. One was the free screening of Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe, which was to be followed immediately by a new documentary on the Senegalese singer, Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love.

I’m really glad I was able to immerse myself in the Film Festival to the extent I could. Technically it would have been possible to see up to five movies a day for 11 days straight, but that would have taken a Herculean effort on my part, and quite frankly I wasn’t up to it.

Considering I didn’t attend even one screening last year, I think I did very well this time around.
I’m still in the process of writing reviews for a bunch of films, which I will eventually add here, but overall the highlights for me were Steven Soderberg’s, Che (parts 1 & 2); the Korean film, Treeless Mountain, and the Turkish film, Three Monkeys. I was also very impressed with JCVD starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the new Australian film, Van Diemen’s Land.

Image courtesy of 2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival

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