16/10/2023 - Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias won the Documentary Award at the prize ceremony for the UK’s leading film festival

The four main prizes at this year’s BFI London Film Festival went to films fresh in their release journeys, which audiences will still be excited to discover over the coming months. With the autumn bash in the UK’s capital enjoying its 67th edition – the first at the helm for new director Kirsty Matheson – the awards themselves were doled out yesterday afternoon at an informal ceremony, with the filmmakers largely giving thanks through video messages. Since 2009, a Best Film Award and an official competition of around a dozen films have been set up, coupled with its First Feature and Documentary Awards, which had existed for decades previous and served to boost the careers of countless filmmakers, including Andrea Arnold, Julia Ducournau and Joanna Hogg.

After he closely missed winning the Golden Lion at Venice, as hearsay states it, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi added to his bulging trophy cabinet, with his wonderful Evil Does Not Exist winning Best Film. An environmentalist drama about a small woodland community resisting a new “glamping” development, its violent, enigmatic final minutes have been some of the most unsettling and talked about in the arthouse world since Michael Haneke’s Hidden [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Margaret Menegoz
interview: Michael Haneke
film profile]. The jury, headed up by director Amat Escalante, and also composed of curator Kate Taylor and novelist Niven Govinden, commended an “assured drama [that] supersedes the sum of its parts; a lyrical portrait of family and community, and a nuanced consideration of the ethics of land development”.

Also a prizewinner at the last Venice, having garnered the Best Director Award in Orizzonti, Mika Gustafson’s Paradise Is Burning [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mika Gustafson
film profile] was granted the Sutherland Award in the First Feature Competition. With a plot not unlike Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows, it follows three young siblings left to fend for themselves, with their mother having been absent since Christmas. The jury, led by filmmaker Raine Allen-Miller (Rye Lane [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]), and also featuring IFFR director Vanja Kaludjercic and music legend Barry Adamson, hailed a film “that has such clarity of cinematic language and vision; we were THERE [sic], not like a fly on the wall or an intruder”.

Bye Bye Tiberias [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lina Soualem
film profile] by Lina Soualem won a very timely Grierson Award in the Documentary Competition. An exploration of the filmmaker’s relationship with her mother, the great Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, as she returns to her home village in northern Israel, Soualem in her statement spoke of how “at a time when we feel unseen, and more stigmatised than ever, our films will always exist to remember us”. The awarding jury was composed of the president, filmmaker Rubika Shah, as well as fellow director Jeanie Finlay and distributor Paul Tonta.

Here is the full list of award winners:

Best Film Award in Official Competition
Evil Does Not Exist - Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Japan)

Sutherland Award in the First Feature Competition
Paradise Is Burning [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mika Gustafson
film profile] - Mika Gustafson (Sweden/Italy/Denmark/Finland)

Grierson Award in the Documentary Competition
Bye Bye Tiberias [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lina Soualem
film profile] - Lina Soualem (France/Palestine/Belgium/Qatar)

Short Film Award
The Archive: Queer Nigerians - Simisolaoluwa Akande (UK)