The Philadelphia Film Festival Award Winning Films (#PFF22)

Last night I attended The Philadelphia Film Festival Closing Night film, Jason Reitman’s Labor Day – Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin have a tremendous amount of chemistry in this movie (review to be included in my #PFF22 round up).

As usual, I didn’t see any of the award winning films. The Philadelphia Film Society is showing them all again today, Saturday 10/26 and tomorrow Sunday 10/27. So, I will see Vic +Flo Saw a Bear, but I’ve got too much else on my plate this weekend to see any of the others.

Would love your comments on any of the winning films listed below or anything you saw during the festival!

Winners for the 22nd Philadelphia Film Festival

Narrative Feature Award Best Narrative Feature Ilo Ilo (dir. Arvin Chen)The moving relationship between a rebellious Singaporean boy and his new Filipino nanny is lovingly captured in director Anthony Chen’s Winner of the Camera d’Or for Best First Feature at Cannes.

Honorable Mention for Best Ensemble
We Are the Best! (starring Mira Birkhammar, Mira Grosin and Liv LeMoyne) Girl power bursts from the screen with this delightful tale of three tweenagers who form a punk band in 1980s Stockholm in the latest from Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson.

Honorable Mention for Best Director
Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (dir. Denis Côté)

Tantalizingly enigmatic, the latest from this Canadian auteur, plays with genre conventions and audience expectations in a film about two aging lesbian ex-cons that is a true original.

Feature
Best Feature – Harmony Lessons (dir. Emir Baigazin) Honorable Mention for Best Cinematography
Harmony Lessons (cinematographer Aziz Zhambakiyev). In a lonely, beautiful village in the steppes of rural Kazakhstan, the squabbles of schoolboys take a tragic turn in this stark Darwinian allegory, the impressive feature debut of director Emir Baigazin.

Documentary Feature Award
Best Documentary Feature – God Loves Uganda (dir. Roger Ross Williams The effects of the American evangelical
fundamentalist movement on the religious and political climate of Uganda
are scrutinized in this eye-opening documentary by Academy
Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams.

Pinkenson Award for Best Local Feature
Best Feature – Let the Fire Burn (dir. Jason Osder) A riveting examination of the fatal standoff between Philadelphia law enforcement and the black militant liberation group MOVE, Let The Fire Burn details the aftermath of this tragic event through both news coverage and the subsequent public hearings.

Best Short
RPG OKC (dir. Emily Carmichael) RPG OKC, short for Role Playing Game OK Cupid, is set in the world of 8-bit fantasy video games. It charts the ups and downs of an online relationship between a dragoon and a cat-woman. It was commissioned by Madatoms, also responsible for Bad Cars, another SotW feature. The style of the film is totally captivating. Carmichael draws all of the 8 bit backgrounds and characters in photoshop, then animates them in flash (a video of the process can be seen here). The result is, in Carmichel’s words, a world that is both “strange yet strangely familiar.

Director of NEBRASKA Alexander Payne was in attendance

My food n film red carpet question to director Alexander Payne – (Prior to seeing movie) “Since Nebraska is a road trip movie, are there any great scenes that take place in a diner along the way?” Payne replied, he’s a big foodie as attested to in both Sideways and The Descendants, but no such scenes take place in Nebraska due to the stark aesthetic and lack of good eats in this Mid Western part of the country. Besides the movie is shot in black and white, not the best for filming cuisine. READ MORE

Writer/Director Stuart Connelly was in attendance for his film
THE SUSPECT

The Suspect is clever on many levels, but mostly because the context becomes the subtext as the movie progresses. In other words, you think it’s a movie about a black man (Mekhi Phifer) being held for suspicion of a crime in a small, rural, all white town, being interrogated by racist cops. The film begins in that dingy cell and we’re all held there for a good bit, until one line of questioning from the cop takes the prisoner to a flashback; little by little the flashbacks pull together a scenario that turns the plot into a psychological heist thriller, having almost nothing to do with race, except for the fact that the psychology only works because of racial stereotyping… READ MORE