Greek movie breaks new horizons

Attenburg, directed by Athina Tsangari, beat off competition from 13 other works in the international category.

Besides the prestige of scooping the top gong, the director was awarded with a cheque for 20,000 euro.

The Wroclaw-based festival champions innovative, experimental cinema, and festival organisers noted how Tsangari is, “more interested in the biology than the psychology of modern man.”

Meanwhile, Hungarian Sandor Kardos won the FIPRESCI international critics' award for Gravedigger, a visually bold work that often slips into surreal and abstract shots, while also experimenting with photographed images, taking the audience back “to pre-Lumière cinema.”

In the New Polish Films Competition, the overall winner was It Looks Pretty from a Distance, by husband and wife team Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal. The film takes a wry look at two idiosyncratic Polish families.

For best Polish debut, the jury picked teen cyberspace drama Suicide Room by Jan Komasa. It is the third time that the film has won a major prize this year, marking another success for the gifted 29-year-old.

Such was the success of the latter film that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is acting as patron of Komasa's next project, City, a major production about the Warsaw Rising – the doomed 1944 insurgency against the Nazis.

The 67th anniversary of the Rising fell on 1 August, and Tusk met the production team yesterday as part of a series of events in the capital. (nh)