Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, Carlos Marqués-Marcet’s They Will Be Dust and Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes scored major wins at Spain’s Valladolid Film Festival on Saturday. The awards marked the second edition under José Luis Cienfuegos and reflected both a vindication of his changes at the festival and an indication of the evolving directions in European arthouse cinema.
Prizes for all three directors build on prior positive reception. Misericordia, which premiered at Cannes, claimed Valladolid’s best picture Golden Spike and the screenplay award. Variety praised it as a “darkly comic backwoods fable of pansexual desire and small-town sociopathy,” calling it a “welcome re-embrace of the streamlined murdery perversities of his terrific Stranger by the Lake.”
The Valladolid jury included Greek director Sofia Exarchou, Spanish actress Aida Folch, critic and editor Devika Girish, German producer Ingmar Trost and Spanish director and writer Luis López Carrasco. They commended Misericordia, saying, “Its lightness conceals a complex balance of genres and tones, beneath whose provincial thriller-comedy appearance lies a profound meditation on how desire and guilt make us predictable and incomprehensible to each other.”
Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes, a Venice competition title and Golden Horse Film Festival highlight, won a Silver Spike. The euthanasia-themed musical They Will Be Dust shared the Silver Spike and received an additional mention for the performances of Alfredo Castro and Angela Molina. The film had its Spanish premiere after winning Toronto’s prestigious Platform award, honoring directors in their mid-career stride, to critical acclaim.
“Ángela Molina and Alfredo Castro have an unexpected bounce in their step as a couple that decides to end their lives in the formally daring drama from the director of 10,000KM,” Variety noted.
In Stranger Eyes, an “elegant, haunted thriller about voyeurism in a time of surveillance,” the “Singaporean writer-director’s third feature uses genre trappings as a mere jumping-off point for a moving, moody reflection on social isolation and alienation,” Variety wrote.
María Laura Weissmahr won best actress for Salve María, directed by Laura Coll. The Locarno world premiere was a celebrated standout at Valladolid, with El Mundo calling it “the most beautiful, furious and intense act of sacrilege of the year.”
Jan Gunnar Roise and Thorbjørn Harr shared the best actor award for their roles in Dag Johan Haugerud’s Norwegian drama Sex, a triple award-winner at the Berlinale earlier this year.
Other prizes were widely distributed, with a larger-than-usual number of North American titles receiving recognition as part of Cienfuego’s initiative to include more international independent cinema. The audience award went to Tracie Laymon’s Bob Trevino Likes It in the main competition, while Louise Courvoisier’s Holy Cow won in the Punto de Encuentro section.
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