“Anna’s Life” takes top prize at Spain’s 31st Cinema Jove

PanARMENIAN.Net - Georgian Nino Basilia’s slice of life social drama “Anna’s Life” took the top Golden Moon prize at Spain’s 31st Cinema Jove Festival, Variety reports.

The biggest film event in Valencia, Spain’s third-biggest city, Cinema Jove focuses on indie-style first and second features.

The Golden Moon plaudit carries a cash prize of €30,000 ($33,177), awarded to the title’s distributor in Spain, a vital sweetener many times at Cinema Jove whose winners tends to be edgier and praiseworthy but still little-known world cinema titles.

World premiering at Sweden’s Goteborg Fest, “Life” turns on the travails of Anna, a single mother trying to raise her autistic son and emigrate illegally to the U.S. Sold internationally by Paris-based New Morning films, “Anna’s Life” is produced by Studio99 in Tbilisi. Cinema Jove’s Golden Moon is its second prize after a Merit Award at early May’s Construir Cine test in Buenos Aires

Cinema Jove’s special jury mention went to Serbian director Nicola Ljuca’s “Humidity” which world premiered at the Berlin’s 2016 Forum.

Movie turns on a successful businessman whose wife disappears, a fact he tries to hide. Why he does so gives the film much of its tension, as it opens up to become a portrait of his family, friends, business and Belgrade politics. Ljuca has described the film as a portrait of a generation which opposed Slobodan Milosevic and seemed poised to change Serbia after his fall in 2000, but instead went into business as capital flowed into Serbia.

A new talent showcase, Cinema Jove’s past guests include Bryan Singer who visited Cinema Jove with his debut “Public Access” and Nicolas Winding Refn who received its Luna de Valencia prize in 2007, four years before “Drive.”

This year, up-and-coming Spanish actress Ingrid García-Jonsson, star of Jaime Rosales’ Un Certain Regard player “Beautiful Youth,” and Daniel Grao, a star of Fernando González Molina’s “Palm Trees in the Snow,” Spain’s biggest B.O. hit of 2016, both picked up Future of Cinema awards.

Cambodia-born auteur Rithy Panh, who was Oscar-nominated for “The Missing Picture,” received the Cinema Jove Honorary Moon Award.

Cinema Jove ran June 17-24. Fest closed with Rodrigo Grande’s heist thriller “At the End of the Tunnel,” starring Leonardo Sbaraglia (“Wild Tales”).