HAN GONG JU WINS MARRAKECH'S TOP PRIZE

A star-studded jury at the 2013 Marrakech International Film Festival has handed its awards out. The festival's grand prize is the Golden Star, and it has gone to Lee Su Jin's Han Gong Ju. Martin Scorsese headed up the jury, which also featured Fatih Akin, Patricia Clarkson, Marion Cotillard, Amat Escalante, Golshifteh Farahani, Anurag Kashyap, Narjiss Nejjar, Park Chan Wook and Paolo Sorrentino.

Golden Star

Han Gong Ju (Lee Su Jin)

Jury Prize

Blue Ruin (Jeremy Saulnier)

The Swimming Pool (Carlos Machado Quintela)

Best Directing

Medeas (Andrea Pallaoro)

Best Performance by an Actor

Slimane Dazi and Didier Machon (Fevers)

Best Performance by an Actress

Alicia Vikander (Hotell)

Cinecoles Prize

Bad (Alaa Akaaboune and Ayoub Lahnoud)

TIR WINS AT ROME

The second documentary to win a major Italian festival's top prize this year after Sacro GRA at Venice, Alberto Fasulo's TIR, about a Bosnian man who tries and fails to find work as a teacher and so moves into truck driving, has won the main prize from James Gray's jury at the Rome Film Festival. It's the first Italian film to win at the nation's capital's festival. Acting honours went Hollywood, though, with wins for Oscar-tipped Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club, and Scarlett Johansson for her voice role in Spike Jonze's Her.

Best Film

TIR (Alberto Fasulo)

Jury Prize

Quod Erat Demonstrandum (Andrei Gruzsniczk)

Special Mention

Blue Sky Bones (Cui Jian)

Best Director

Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Seventh Code)

Best Actor

Matthew McConaughey (Dallas Buyers Club)

Best Actress

Scarlet Johansson (Her)

Best Screenplay

Tayfun Pirselimoglu (I Am Not Him)

Best Technical Contribution

Koichi Takahashi (Seventh Code)

Best First or Second Film

Out of the Furnace (Scott Cooper)

Best Emerging Actor / Actress

Acrid - ensemble

Best Italian Documentary

Dal Profondo (Valentina Pedicini)

Cinema XXI Section - Innovations in Cinema

Nepal Forever (Aliona Polunina)

Audience Award

Dallas Buyers Club

STOCKHOLM BRONZE HORSE GOES TO THE SELFISH GIANT

After winning Best European Film in the Directors' Fortnight Selection at Cannes, Special Jury Prize for Conner Chapman and the Golden Starfish Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Hamptons, commendations for its leads Chapman and Shaun Thomas at LFF and two major awards at AFI Fest, and receiving seven BIFA nominations, Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant has just won the top prize, the Bronze Horse, at the Stockholm Film Festival. It beat films such as 12 Years a Slave, Child's Pose, Miss Violence and Fruitvale Station to the award at the 24th SIFF. I'm very pleased to see special awards going to two of my favourite directors, Claire Denis and Peter Greenaway. Full list of winners right here:

Best Film

The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard)

Special Mention: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)

Best Actor

George Mackay (For Those in Peril)

Best Actress

Jasmine Trinca (Miele)

Best Script

Alexandros Avranas and Kostos Peroulis (Miss Violence)

Best Cinematography

Lorenzo Hagerman (Heli)

Best Music

Hans Zimmer (12 Years a Slave)

Best First Film

Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler)

Telia Film Award

Child's Pose (Calin Peter Netzer)

Stockholm Feature Film Award

She's Wild Again Tonight (Fia-Stina Sandlund)

Citroen DS Rising Star Award

Adam Lundgren

Stockholm Lifetime Achievement Award

Claire Denis

Stockholm Visionary Award

Paul Greengrass

Best Short Film

Tears of Inge (Alisi Telengut)

Special Mention: The Reunion (Anna Odell)

1km Film - Scholarship

Forar (John Skoog)

Special Mention: Mr. Magdy, Room Number 17 Please (Carl Olsson)

Ifestival Audience Award

Swear (Lea Becker)

AFI FEST WINNERS

AFI Fest can be pretty easy to ignore, serving as little more than yet another autumn festival / Oscar launchpad, screening a bland combination of mainstream American populist fare and foreign and indie films which have already made the festival tour. But have a look at the winners they've chosen, and you, like I was, may be pleasantly surprised, particularly at the proliferation of female directors honoured in their selections.

New Auteurs Critics' Award

Katrin Gebbe (Nothing Bad Can Happen)

New Auteurs Special Award for Direction

Clio Barnard (The Selfish Giant)

New Auteurs Special Award for Personal Storytelling

Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross (In Bloom)

DAVID O RUSSELL TO RECEIVE AFI FEST TRIBUTE

This must be for I Heart Huckabees. Or Spanking the Monkey. Or Flirting with Disaster. It must be. It can't be for anything else. Surely not. Please no. 21:00 a week from today, the 8th of November

CLARKSON, COTILLARD, SORRENTINO ROUND OUT SCORSESE'S MARRAKECH JURY

An already star-studded jury has added three more famous names. The 13th Marrakech Film Festival jury is to be presided over by none other than Martin Scorsese, and it has been announced that Patricia Clarkson, Marion Cotillard an Paolo Sorrentino are to join him. They fill out a jury list that already included Fatih Akin, Amat Escalante, Golshifteh Farahani, Anurag Kashyap, Narjiss Nejjar and Park Chan Wook. The festival will take place between the 29th of November and the 7th of December, and its film lineup will be unveiled next week.

IDA WINS LFF BEST FILM AWARD

It may not have been my favourite film at LFF, never mind my favourite among the competition titles I saw (though I did only see three), but I can appreciate the level of artistry achieved by Pawel Pawlikowski in Ida, which won the Best Film prize at London on Saturday night, given out by jury president, recently-retired film critic Philip French. The film also won the FIPRESCI prize at TIFF last month. Additionally, the Grierson award for Best Documentary went to Paul-Julien Robert's My Fathers, My Mother and Me, the Sutherland award for the Best First Feature went to Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo (it won the equivalent award at Cannes in May and is Singapore's official entry into the Oscar Best Foreign Language Film race), the Best British Newcomer award went to screenwriter Jonathan Asser for Starred Up, and The Selfish Giant leads Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas, who were nominated for that award, were also commended. Sir Christopher Lee received a BFI Fellowship at the ceremony too.

REVIEW - THE STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS

A scintillating, sensual plunge into the mind of man, as imagined by master stylists Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. To see the product of their genius is to see cinema manipulated as few, if any, other artists are capable of manipulating. It is not only the immediate effect of each beautifully-constructed shot or scene or sound, it is also the cumulative effect of these elements in expressing primal psychological truths. Here, they employ their astounding array of skills to re-invent the mystery film, through the various veils of detective noir, giallo horror, and then their own, singular style. It is the genre built almost entirely anew, and then itself gradually bled to death, as the action becomes less physical, more cerebral, more interior, more abstract. Any which way, though, those strange colours are divine, the set and costume design luxurious, the cinematography luxuriant. And what vivid, courageously bold sound design, the very definition of the apex of what can be accomplished with this generally overlooked aspect of filmmaking - the coarse shred of metal through skin, the dripping sanguine spill on slick latex. After the female-centric Amer, Cattet and Forzani delve into the male psyche with The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, and deduce that while man and woman may be equally self-destructive, man is altogether more destructive of woman too. Intrigue is mixed with fear, desire is the primary source of motive, and the quest to satisfy it is the primary source of dissatisfaction. A central, virtuosic sequence which pits several nude Klaus Tanges against one another is one of the most dazzling of the year.

REVIEW - THE LAST OF THE UNJUST

It is not cinema's definitive Holocaust documentary. It is not even director Claude Lanzmann's definitive Holocaust documentary. But can there ever be enough documentaries about the Holocaust? Can there ever be no more to say on the topic? What Benjamin Murmelstein had to say to Lanzmann in 1975, and what Lanzmann has to say today, can never be forgotten, as none of it can, nor should. But though all we feel we can do now is remember, we know that the past remains with us in the present, and even if these inconceivable acts never occur again, they are as much a part of the present as what else we feel now. Lanzmann will not allow us to forget, and he implores us to remember. Murmelstein remembers a lot, more than he understands, it seems. The more we hear from him, the more we realise that we don't hear from him. The last of three Jewish Council elders at Adolf Eichmann's 'model ghetto' Theresienstadt, he is the only elder from any ghetto to survive the war. His perspective on it is unique in that obvious sense, but also in its peculiarities. It's not about what he remembers, but what he feels, or what he doesn't feel about it, and what we can learn about this egregious period of recent history through bearing witness to this. Lanzmann, in beautiful, sensitive fashion, cunningly induces feelings in us, too, and thoughts, reaching beyond the instant and the clear details, extremely clear when related by Murmelstein, and into the whole of humanity. We come closer to understanding how enormous a loss was inflicted upon the Jews, which is an achievement indeed.

REVIEW - HELI

What fuels these people is not what they do but how they feel. They can't do much, see. Not out here, where Amat Escalante has abandoned them. Though not that he cares how they feel anyway. What the world will do to them and what they will do to each other will purge all feeling from their souls, until they are rendered mute, without family, without friends, without employment. But not without purpose - we, like all other species, like the cow in the mud pit or the dog in the derelict yard, are on this mean, hard, vicious planet to procreate. In the end, all that is left of us is not how we felt, but what we did, the people we left behind us to feel even worse than we did, all going well. His view of the world is deliberately pessimistic, and deliberately false, not because it erases the joy from life but because it erases the hope, which is something we can't help but feel. Watching these morbid creatures, permanently unfulfilled by the remnants of an existence once promised to them, flirt with the concept of hope is draining. In this false world Escalante has created, melodramatic in its content but resolutely stoical in its presentation, we do not engage, we do not attempt to understand and we do not learn. We observe with a passivity that places us alongside the inhabitants of this world, arid and stifling, a dust storm streaming past one's eyes with a guarantee only that it will never relent. These barren, wide open spaces are somehow sealed, the roads leading us out simply don't exist. You plainly don't know what a director can achieve via depictions of physical brutality until you've seen what Escalante achieves. Performances from a mostly young cast excellently match the tone of the screenplay.

REVIEW - 12 YEARS A SLAVE

When Mr. Moon arrives at Edwin Epps' plantation to rescue Solomon Northup from the ages upon ages he has spent in bondage, it's only more surprising for him than it is for us. Has it been 12 years? Has it been mere weeks? Has it been an entire lifetime? It has, one way or another, been a very long time, an eternity, an infinity. He has been suppressed, compressed into something resembling just the wreckage of a human being, no longer seen as one by the world around him. As an object thieved from individual existence and bound into effective worthlessness as a conscious entity, he is not so much a victim of racism as of plain inhumanity. If this is finally the film that America, the world's most famous, prolific and successful filmmaking nation, needs, if this is finally the challenge it ought to have met so many years ago, it too is a part of that infinity, not to explain nor apologise for the sins mankind once committed nor to deter use from committing them again, but to reflect, with honesty and urgency, and cruel, brutal force. And it's not just America that must meet this force, and succumb to it. It's all of mankind. Steve McQueen is foremost an artist, and he deals with artistic convention, crafting a work that is a familiar story told using familiar tools but to unfamiliar ends. Immediately, it is a dazzling meeting of sound and image. Cumulatively, it is riveting. It is also the first of his films to relate directly to the world in which it is situated, and we too. The unbearable pain that Northup experiences once rescued, the bewildering terror of reacquainting himself with a life he struggled for so long to see again, cannot compare to the hopelessness that has consumed the lives of so many around him and, as McQueen refuses to permit us to forget, so many others. And so a portrait of the ordeal of one man becomes a portrait of the whole human race, of the enslavers and the enslaved, of pure humanity and pure inhumanity, of pure intelligence and pure stupidity. The reason you can't turn away? It's simple - 12 Years a Slave isn't just about Solomon Northup. It's about you.

REVIEW - STRANGER BY THE LAKE

In dappled hues of azure blue and soothing, leafy green and dazzling gold, the rippled abs of the naked male lapping up the rippled waves of the lake, slick, enveloping, still water, the unknown beneath its surface, l'inconnu du lac. This lake radiates desire as it reflects the dazzling sunlight, desire for friendship, desire for sex, desire for blood. Desire for power, perhaps, or for knowledge, for understanding, for acceptance. Even a perverted desire for love. All desires denied these men by the world beyond this hermetic lake, never glimpsed - the desires they carry with them they can barely admit to, not verbally, and they seem bizarre, mystical, aberrant in this topsy-turvy paradise, where openness takes on a very different form than in the outer world. Honesty is indeed not even unexpected but faintly, implicitly forbidden. Nudity, on the other hand, is quite expected. It is also quite prolific in Alain Guiraudie's film. He eschews cinematic trickery in favour of a refreshing focus on natural beauty - be it the moonlight on the lake, the wind brushing through the trees, or the carnal beauty of caramel skin, chiselled features, and an intense shock of thick ejaculate. As a noir in the blinding daylight, it's a sensuous, sublime tour into an idealised world, not perfect but perfectly desirable, and perfectly disquieting. And when these men, each desperate in their own way, desperate to maintain control over one another, and a life they don't even half-understand, drop their guard, with the thrill of exposing themselves with full frankness, at last, this noir becomes a troubling study of loneliness, and of the inadequacy of those aesthetic pleasures, which this film is so rich in. Emotional pleasures are sought here most of all; they are constantly at stake, yet so rarely on offer.

REVIEW - THE PAST

We strain every day to live our lives in the present. We yearn to be free of the grip of the past. But we are naive and vulnerable, and we yield to that grip when we seek comfort and assurance, security in the familiar. Asghar Farhadi's The Past is an impressively complex, perhaps even too complex study of the effects that our past has on our present, on our actions and our reactions. His perception of the daunting, often contradictory design of the emotional structure of the human mind is beyond reproach, and his comprehension of the nature in which the truth reveals itself, gradually, and frequently misrepresented or misunderstood, is without rival in mainstream cinema today. He has the confidence to explore the respective psyches of a collection of individual people, and to present their thoughts and ideas without external justification, accepting every aspect of each of these people no matter how unflattering, and allowing us to evaluate and accept each of them ourselves... initially. Because as Farhadi closes his narrative loop, defiantly unhurriedly, he begins to categorise his characters, rendering them good or bad, weak or strong, philanthropic or self-centred. Of particular concern is his glorification of his two, largely infallible, male lead roles, who both seem driven by reason and love and the will to make things right. Farhadi is so fixated by these characters that he doesn't bestow due attention on the other, more compelling figures - teenage Lucie is vilified rather than sought to be understood, and scenes with the younger children are simply so darn perfect that one wonders if The Past wouldn't be infinitely better if told from their perspective. From any perspective, though, Farhadi remains a supreme talent, and I'm a fan of his ingenious use of space - unlike many directors, he knows instinctively how people utilise their surroundings, and how their surroundings influence their activity. A minor detail, perhaps, with a major impact.

REVIEW - BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOUR

The look of love, the touch of love, the smell of love, the taste of love. It is a near-mythical love. It extends far beyond the immediate object of one's love, that person who ignites it, and receives it, in all its joy and all its hurt. It is to discover true love for the first time, and perhaps for the only time, to drain the resources of love from one's heart. A passion of inconceivable intensity, at the cost of knowing that you will never be able to feel this way again. But it is irresistible, and so we yield. We emerge from this love, smarter, stronger, much more sensible, but it is not a fair trade, it is not an exchange. We are bereft of that which consumed and defined and drove our very being while we were in its midst. It was rapture, pure rapture. Blue Is the Warmest Colour is that same rapture. The heart-stopping, breath-taking, furious euphoria of adjoining one's body to another's and both giving and accepting a most intimate and exquisite of pleasures. The acrid, violent brutality of having that seemingly indestructible bond torn apart, wrenching oneself away whether willingly or not, the sheer enormity of the pain that is inflicted, and the sound knowledge that this is a pain that will never fully subside. Even the consummate beauty of art, of painting and of literature, even of food, even of philosophy. This is a film that you don't just want to watch, you want to live it. Its most sublime moments, and its most grotesque, all of it. For Adele, in these wondrous few years, to live it is to love it, and to love is to live. The look, the touch, smell, taste of love. She lives every bit of it.

REVIEW - NIGHT MOVES

It takes three people, months of planning, a $10,000 second-hand boat and 500lbs of ammonium nitrate fertiliser to blow up one dam - one among twelve. It takes a rise in water level of 15 feet to kill one person. It takes the death of one person to destroy the lives of three. Kelly Reichardt has fashioned something of a cinematic oxymoron - a contemplative thriller, slow and static, and utterly engrossing. The detail with which she and Jon Raymond have imbued these characters is outstanding - they're not 'flawed' in the stupid, hokey sense of 'flawed' characters, instead they're thoroughly multi-faceted, and possessed of ambiguous attributes, such that they might each create a wholly different imprint on one viewer from the next, as real people do in real life. And much of this detail is never spoken of, never alluded to. It's simply expressed in the most minute, ephemeral moments of lucidity, as we discover yet another deeper truth behind Jesse Eisenberg's enigmatic expression. The net effect is one of benevolence, as Reichardt discloses so much, and also of respect, as the feeling remains that there's so much more as yet unearthed by our fickle minds, so much more to gain upon repeat viewings. What a gratifying experience, and that's even before one touches upon Night Moves' incredible achievements as thriller. The middle section of the film, in which environmentalists Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard (all excellent) effectuate their plot, one which will eventually prove a tad futile concerning their intentions, and more than a tad lethal, is as tremendously tense as any more complicated sequence from the most sophisticated suspense films. It's a perfectly tart cherry on top of a rich, and healthy cake from a true virtuoso filmmaker.

FULL AFI FEST LINEUP

After all the switcheroos following Foxcatcher's strategic retreat to 2014, the full list for the 2013 AFI Fest (7-14 November) has been announced. Joining opening night gala Saving Mr. Banks, closing night gala Inside Llewyn Davis and previously announced centrepiece galas Out of the Furnace and Nebraska are fellow centrpiece galas August: Osage County, Lone Survivor, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and a 3D version of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, alongside special screenings of Her, The Invisible Woman, Jodorowsky's Dune, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, The Past, Philomena and The Unknown Known.

REVIEW - RIGOR MORTIS

High art applied to low art. Well, just how high that art is is subjective, of course, but it's at least high-ly entertaining! And though there's much I'll overlook in a film when it entertains me as Rigor Mortis did, there's not much I need to in this case. Vivid and graphic and sumptuously styled, Juno Mak's debut as director is a brilliantly bold, brash horror movie, embellished with all the tricks and tools in the book, strung together by Mak's craft and care for the outrageous pulp he's cooking with here. A former film star moves into a dilapidated apartment block in Hong Kong, where one of the inhabitants is set on opening a pathway to the world of the undead via the corpse of one of his neighbours. Mak is diligent in setting his scene, utilising swathes of the film's runtime to establish plot, character and location, but is wary of the demands of his audience too. Sequences both visually thrilling and emotionally touching may impede the pace of the film, but they sate one's appetite for minor narrative and stylistic catharsis in the early stages of a pure genre film such as this. Quite futile, alas, if Mak can't summon up a killer third act, which he obligingly does with gusto. The technical elements of Rigor Mortis are exemplary, with any number of memorable, gorgeous, potentially iconic horror imagery, and a scrumptiously thick, rich, overblown sound mix. Mak's dedication to these elements, integral to the success of almost any horror film, is sure and steady, and his flair as director is of particular note given that this is his first film in that capacity. His film may break no boundaries, push no envelopes, as so many films of its ilk may aspire to do, but it is just about as fun an experience as you can have at the movies, and that's enormously fulfilling.

REVIEW - THE SELFISH GIANT

Though it rather strictly follows the narrative lines you predict of it, Clio Barnard's The Selfish Giant is a stunning film, reaching a degree of emotional impact that is truly stirring. Just as there is a place for politically-charged social realism, there is a place for this more passive style, whose deeper significance, if there is any, is ambiguous and left to the discernment of the individual viewer, and is determined purely by the humanistic strength of the material, which is truly momentous in the case of The Selfish Giant. Stylistically unambitious, Barnard's film strives instead to provide an impression of life in rural, even poverty-stricken Yorkshire that is authentic and visceral. Her task is minute in some respects, but vast in others... well, it's hard to deduce where Barnard's touch as director, or as writer, or the sheer talent of the cast each begin and end, but the work they achieve in collaboration is immense. So convincing are these performances that it's a genuine struggle to imagine the actors leading lives in the real world, and so keenly, beautifully adroit is Barnard's depiction of life in this run-down corner of northern England, like so many others, that one feels an immediate, and profound connection to it, as though we not only were there in the moment, but had been there all our lives, and developed that connection since birth. It hardly matters where Barnard takes these people from here on out - and indeed she falls back on storytelling custom at every juncture - as it is not the specifics of what happens that bears most magnitude, but the effects of what happens, and what we, and the characters, are put through in the process. The final 20 minutes are as powerful as they come.

REVIEW - THE MISSING PICTURE

There is no end to suffering. The Khmer Rouge may be long gone from Cambodia, but they are not so long gone from the souls of those whose lives they changed forever, damaged irreparably. Rithy Panh remembers every detail, but is there beauty and art in his recollection, and its recreation in this undeniably beautiful film, or is this just therapy? Either way, it's immensely moving, in fact from the very first moments to the very last. The clay figurines which Panh utilises to supply that missing picture, that of the true emotion that did not reach beyond Cambodia's borders, are borne out of the same earth as the victims of Pol Pot's regime disappeared into, and are profoundly expressive, despite their simplicity. Indeed, their simplicity allows Panh to communicate his harrowing messages succinctly and uniquely. Set to a mournful score, the images Panh devises, in this context rendered anew, and the poetic narration possess supreme emotive strength. And what remains is not the emotion of hope, or anger, or joy, or sadness. It is grief, despair, suffering. The despondency and bitterness in Panh's tone and the pain it has so clearly caused him to make this film are palpable, and transmitted directly to the hearts and minds of the viewers through a minimum of devices, a testament to the power of sound and image, unadorned with technical wizardry. It's rather hard to imagine it, a film so steeped in the past having such an impact in the present. But then, surely it is about the present. That grief, that despair, that suffering live on today. There is no end to suffering.

REVIEW - EASTERN BOYS

I couldn't tell you what I was expecting from Robin Campillo's Eastern Boys, but I wasn't expecting this. Although conventional in style and content, the film is a disarming blend of thriller and romance, while never succumbing to clear genre specifications in either case. Daniel tours Paris' Gare du Nord in search of one of those eastern boys, the immigrants willing to service his needs and wants in exchange for enough euros to bide their time until the next sucker drops past the station. At least, that's what he, not in disrespect but in naivety, thinks. He's the sucker, as his intended dalliance with the Ukrainian Marek rapidly becomes something much more damaging, and much more threatening. Contained within is less a romance than a study of how vulnerable human beings, leading ostensibly stable existences but on the brink of desperation, seek comfort and help in one another, smartly if selfishly identifying a similar helplessness in their targets. How Daniel and Marek manipulate the other's circumstances to benefit their own is especially intriguing due to the success with which they conceal their motives, and how deep-seated these motives may be. Control and power are sought by both, indeed by all the major figures in Campillo's film, but also love and acceptance. These are issues which define us all, and Campillo is wise to imply that they remain unresolved even at the film's close, despite an intelligent, rather positive conclusion. And if the final act relies heavily on traditional thriller techniques, it does so smoothly and sparingly, and always in service of the story. And, having been riveted to said story for two hours, I can still attest that I wasn't expecting any of that.