02/07/2012 - Penny Woolcock film wins Michael Powell Award for Best British Film

Director Penny Woolcock (photo) has won The Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film for One Mile Away at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The jury, headed by Jim Broadbent, described the work as “a brave and honest film tackling a huge problem with sensitivity and skill, not only charting the efforts to reconcile a community but also showing the great wealth of creativity that is part of that struggle.”

Woolcock said, “Winning the Michael Powell Award is a tremendous boost for us to help get the film and its message out to where it needs to be in our inner cities.”

Andrea Riseborough and Bríd Brennan jointly won Awards for Best Performance in a British Feature Film for their turns in James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer [+see also:
trailer
making of
film profile].

The Award for Best Film in the International Feature Competition went to Mao Mao for Here, Then. The Jury said: “The jury acknowledges the festival and its Artistic Director, Chris Fujiwara, for an outstanding, challenging and brave selection of films that included both fiction and documentaries and enabled us to watch the best of the world’s new cinema. Every work we had the privilege to see brought something new and extraordinary to us and choosing the best was a difficult task.”

Gaston Solnicki’s Papirosen won a special mention in the International Competition.