Le Havre

Here’s my announcement story for the awards of the 47th annual Chicago International Film Festival — brainchild and passion of festival founder and longtime artistic director Michael Kutza, who started the show back in 1965 and has headed it up ever since. This year’s, many thought, was one of the best, and there were lots of first-rate films on the fest schedule that didn’t win prizes. Here are the ones who did.

Aki Kaurismaki, long a familiar name in international art film circles, won the top award, The Gold Hugo for Best Picture, at this year’s 47th annual edition of the Chicago International Film Festival, for his latest film, the Finnish-French co-production Le Havre.  The awards were announced Friday evening, October 14 by Kutza, by head programmer Mimi Plauche, and by other fest programmers.

It was, as mentioned above, a strong festival and a particularly strong prizewinner from the always provocative Kaurismaki. The often impudent and rebellious Finnish filmmaker — director of  world art house critical hits like Ariel, Leningrad Cowboys Go America, The Match Factory Girl and The Man Without a Past — examines, in Le Havre, the plight of illegal immigrants in the market of the French port city, as a one time author, and present day Le Havre shoeshine man (Andre Wilms), tries to shield a young African refugee from the police.

Cairo 678

Winner of the Chicago festival’s Silver Hugo, for runner-up best feature, was the audacious Egyptian feminist social drama,  Cairo 678, a powerful work by first-time writer-director Mohamed Diab. Cairo 678 also took a second Silver Hugo, winning Best Actor honors for Maged El Kedwany as the savvy police detetcive charged with investigating a string of violent events. The Silver Hugo for Best Actress, meanwhile, went to the United Kingdom’s Olivia Coleman, for her role as a compassionate but troubled Christian worker in Tyrannosaur, the writer-director feature debut of actor Paddy Considine. And The Silver Hugo for Best Screenplay went to the United States-Albanian-Danish-Turkish co-production, The Forgiveness of Others, a brodding tale of an Albanian blood feud, and the way it tears apart a family — written by director Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace) and Andamion Murataj.

The Gold Hugo in the New Directors Competition (for first or second features) was won by director Zaida Bergroth’s explosive family drama The Good Son, from Finland, with the competition’s runner-up Silver Hugo going to the Icelandic/Danish Volcano, a moving romance from another debuting feature filmmaker, Danish writer-director Runar Runarsson.

Kutza presented the Founder’s Award to writer-director Michel Hazanovicius’ brilliant black and white pastiche of silent movies, The Artist. And the festival also gave a career Silver Hugo to French filmmaker Claude (A Man and a Woman) Lelouch, on the occasion of his 50th anniversary of making films, and a career Artistic Achievement Award to actor Anthony Mackie. The documentary prizes went to director -cowriter Mira Turaljic’s Cinema Komunisto, an imaginative archival survey of cinematic and political culture from Serbia (Gold Hugo winner) and to director-cowriter Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s vibrant portrait of her grandmother-in-law, legendary Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland.

The International Feature Film Competition jury consisted of Jury President Nimrod Antal (of  the U.S./Hungary), Leonardo Garcia Tsao (Mexico) , Claudia Landsberger (The Netherlands), Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz (Puerto Rico) and Bhawana Somaaya (India). The award announcements were made at the Public — the hotel that was once the Ambassador East, site of that iconic Chicago haunt, the Pump Room.

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