Sylvester Stallone, ‘A Land Imagined’ Honored at El Gouna Film Festival
SOURCE: VARIETY
BY: NICK VIVARELLI
Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival has wrapped its second edition, with Singaporean director Yeo Slew Hua’s noir title “A Land Imagined” winning the Golden Star, the fest’s top prize, awarded by a jury headed by Oscar-winning Croatian producer Cedomir Kolar (“No Man’s Land”).
The genre pic, shot mostly at night, is about a jaded Singapore cop investigating the disappearance of a Chinese construction worker. It previously won the Locarno Film Festival’s Golden Leopard in August. The El Gouna award carries $50,000 in prize money, to be divided equally between the director and the main producer, Fran Borgia, and his Akanga Film Asia shingle.
Egyptian director A.B. Shawky’s unconventional road movie “Yomeddine” won Best Arab Narrative Feature award and split honors for the fest’s Cinema for Humanity audience prize with “Another Day of Life,” an animation-documentary hybrid about the experiences of war journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in 1970s Angola. This Spanish-Polish co-production is directed by Raul de la Fuente and Damian Nenow.
Shawky was also honored during El Gouna with the Variety MENA Talent of the Year Award. “Yomeddine,” in which a middle-aged man raised in a leper colony embarks on a journey across Egypt with a sidekick and a donkey, is Shawky’s first feature and is Egypt’s candidate for the foreign-language Oscar.
British photographer-turned-director Richard Billingham’s cine-memoir “Ray and Liz” won the Gouna Silver Star, while “The Heiresses” by Paraguay’s Marcello Mattinessi won the competition’s Bronze Star.
Acting honors went to Poland’s Joanna Kulig, star of Pavel Pawlikovsky’s “Cold War,” and to Tunisia’s Mohamed Dhrif for his performance as the determined father in Mohammed Ben Attia’s ISIS-themed “Dear Son.”
U.S. titles fared well in the documentary competition, where Participant Media’s ecological doc “Aquarela,” which is both an ode to and a wake-up call about water, took that section’s Gold Star.
Prizes for festival entries totaled more than $220,000, the same amount as last year. However, the fest more than doubled the cash prizes, now totaling $175,000, for Arabic projects at its Cinegouna co-production market, where industry presence was strong. Attending were Berlin’s newly appointed artistic director, Carlo Chatrian, Tribeca topper Frederic Boyer, and Sundance programmer Heidi Zwicker.
Following the unexpected shuttering last December of the Dubai fest and market after 14 editions, El Gouna is certainly better-positioned to play a prominent role as an Arab film industry driver and bridgehead into the Middle East for quality international films.
The closing ceremony last Friday in the Red Sea resort’s open-air auditorium drew a mix of Hollywood and Arabic stars, including Sylvester Stallone, who was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award, Owen Wilson, Patrick Dempsey, Clive Owen, Egypt’s Yousra and Yasmine Sabri, and Tunisia’s Dora Zarrouck.