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Concorto Film Festival 2020 – The winners of the 19th edition

The Asino d’Oro (Golden Donkey) to the Best Film:
Giòng sông không nhìn thấy (The Unseen River) by Pham Ngoc Lan
Vietnam/Laos, 2020, Fiction, 23’

We are fascinated by the unbelievable places, the searching camera, how the film directs our gaze over the sound and the meandering way to tell us this story. A film like a dream. And in the flow of time we lose ourselves completely in the Mekong. Are we already sleeping? Just follow the light on the angle. A film that absorbed and overwhelmed us. The Gran Premio “Asino d’oro” goes to “The Unseen River” by Pham Ngoc Lân.

Special Jury Award:
The End of Suffering (A Proposal) by Jacqueline Lentzou
Greece, 2020, Fiction, 14’

A film that is at once an ode to melancholy, imagination and cinema. And the more time one spends with it, the more odes one discovers. Can cinema be an end to suffering? Watching it certainly is to dream awake. We are overtaken with the beauty, sensibility and emotional intelligence conveyed by the (proposed) alternative reality that is “The End of Suffering (a proposal)” by Jacqueline Lentzou. It’s our immense pleasure to award it the Special Jury Prize.


Special Mention:

Genius Loci by Adrien Merigeau
France, 2019, Animation, 16’ 20’’

Young Jury Special Award:
Clean with Me (After Dark) by Gabrielle Stemmer
France, 2019, Documentary, 21’

“Clean with me” is a completely subjective insight into the feminine universe, shown through videos taken from YouTube and Instagram. It is a journey that moves further and further, pushing the viewer into an absurd and full of paradoxes world that is hard to believe in.
We awarded it Best Short for the creativity of its editing, its coherence, the research behind the work, and the use of social media to really dive into personal experiences of women, often portrayed as mothers and wives, whose stories are told within the documentary.


Young jury Special Mention:

Uzi (Ties) by Dina Velikovskaya
Russia/Germany, 2019, Animation, 7’ 36’’

A lovely, straightforward, and delicate short that takes full advantage of the representative and poetic power that animation only has. A light but yet tense narration about how powerful the ties we create, loosen and transform are. The cutting of the umbilical cord, though traumatic for both parents and children, results in the acknowledgement that even when apart and, why not, changed, the tie is still there.

Audience Award:
Ijrain Maradona (Maradona’s Legs) by Firas Khoury
Germany/Palestine, 2019, Fiction, 23’