17/10/2011

Swedish actress-turned-director Pernilla August’s feature debut, Beyond [+see also:
trailer
film profile], was today (October 17) awarded the Nordic Council Film Prize – Sweden’s third win of Scandinavia’s €47,000 and largest film trophy (after Josef Fares’ Zozo [+see also:
trailer
film profile], and Roy Andersson’s You, the Living. August will receive the prize – which she will share with co-scriptwriter Lolita Ray and producers Helena Danielsson and Ralf Karlsson - at the council’s session in Copenhagen on November 2. The film has reached 650,000 admissions in Scandinavia for Nordisk Film.

UK actress and honorary jury Chairwoman Helen Mirren announced the choice between five Nordic nominées at a press conference in Copenhagen organised by the Nordisk Film & TV Fond, which has managed the prize since it was instigated in 2002, and became an annual event in 2005, as the council’s accolades for literature, music, nature and environment.

“August’s film is a hard-hitting and complex drama, raw and delicate at the same time; dark, yet filled with the light of life,” said the jury of Mirren, Danish critic Per Juul Carlsen, Finnish communications chief Outi Heiskanen, Icelandic manager Sif Gunnarsdottir, Norwegian editor Silje Riise Næss, Swedish critic Fredrik Sahlin and head of Nordisk Film & TV Fond Hanne Palmquist.

“With her team she shows a remarkable eye for details and nuances and a talent for making the difficult look easy. The acting is extraordinary – the film is a very personal and original adaptation of a bestselling novel,” the jury added of the screen adaption of Swedish-Finnish author Susanna Alakoski’s novel of a Finnish young girl’s upbringing in the Swedish region of Ystad.

Starring Noomi Rapace (Millennium), Beyond was selected for the Critics’ Week in Venices, where it took two top prizes, adding to similar honours in Sao Paolo and Lübeck. August was named Best Director at the Guldbagge awards – Sweden’s national film prizes –and her first feature is Sweden’s candidate for the Oscar-nomination as Best Foreign-Language Feature.

After Beyond August – who won Best Actress in Cannes for Cannes-winner for Danish director Bille August’s Best Intentions (1991) - has left the director’s chair to star in Swedish director Mikael Marcimain’s feature debut, Call Girl, a political thriller based on a 1977 brothels scandal, and Swedish veteran director Jan Troell’s Truth and Consequence, about an anti-Hitler publicist and editor.