15/01/2016 - Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams received the critics’ Best Actor Award at the American international showcase

Alicia Vikander with her Rising Star Award at Palm Springs (© Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

Twenty-seven-year-old Swedish actress Alicia Vikander was crowned with the Rising Star Award at the most recent Palm Springs International Film Festival, while Icelandic actors Sigurður Sigurjónsson and Theodór Júlíusson accepted the international film critics’ FIPRESCI Prize for Best Actors in a Foreign-language Film, for their performances in Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Grimur Hakonarson
film profile] at the gathering’s closing ceremony at Spencer’s Restaurant in Palm Springs.

Vikander was awarded for her role in UK director Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Paco Delgado
film profile], where she played Gerda Wegener, the wife of Danish transgender pioneer Lili Elbe. “An astonishing screen presence and a masterful performance – Vikander projects so much love and pain,” said festival chairman Harold Matzner.

Nominated for two Golden Globes (for Best Actress in The Danish Girl and Best Supporting Actress in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina [+see also:
film review
trailer
making of
film profile]), she is still in the running for the BAFTA Awards for the two roles, which will be handed out on 14 February. Having already shot US directors John Wells’ Burnt and Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans [+see also:
trailer
film profile], and UK director Justin Chadwick’s Tulip Fever, Vikander is now filming with US actor Matt Damon in the untitled Bourne sequel, directed by the British filmmaker Paul Greengrass.

In Hákonarson’s Rams, Sigurjónsson and Júlíusson perform as two brothers who live side by side in the remote valley of Bárdardalur, but who have not spoken in 40 years; they must now come together to save what is dearest to them: their sheep stock and prized rams. The jury praised them for “their darkly comic urgency and sense of a shared past, and the graceful way they guide their characters from animosity to interdependence”. Since the film was launched last year at Cannes, winning the Un Certain Regard Award to boot, it has collected 13 prizes on its tour of the international festival circuit.