04/11/2002 - Rana’s Wedding and Cristina Comencini's Il più bel giorno della mia vita win the Jury and Audience awards at the 24th Festival of Mediterranean Cinema

The 24th edition of the Montpellier Festival of Mediterranean Cinema ended on a high note with the screening of Murnau’s Nosferatu, on the 80th anniversary of its release, accompanied by live music from Claudio Simonetti (responsible for many of Dario Argento’s most memorable film scores).
The festival showcased the very best of this year’s film productions from the Mediterranean basin, as well as numerous retrospectives and tributes. The international jury awarded the Golden Antigone to a Palestinian film entitled Rana’s Wedding by Hany Abu-Assad. The audience award went to Italy’s Il più bel giorno della mia vita by Cristina Comencini. The film won this year’s Montreal Film Festival.
The other winners were Dima El-Hoor’s Prêt-à-porter Imm Ali, a Lebanese-French co-production that won the City of Montpellier Gran Prix for best short – as well as a cash prize of Euros 4000 and Romanian Gheorghe Sfaiter’s The Shelter that won the Ulysses Award for best documentary and Euros 2800 from the Montpellier Academy and the Federico Fellini Centre Library.
In the “scholarship towards development” section, a number of pre-selected projects were presented to a commission of film industry operators who assigned scholarships to Eram Rklis for The Syrian Bride (Israel) and to Rachid Benahidj (Algeria-France) for The Lamb of the Orient. The French Ministry for Communications and Culture and the CNC presented the pair with cheques for Euros 7000 each.
The 24th was the first edition of Montpellier under the direction of Jean- François Bourgeot and it is expected that next year’s silver anniversary edition will attract something close to 100,000 visitors.