email print share on Facebook share on Twitter share on LinkedIn share on reddit pin on Pinterest

TROMSØ 2025 Awards

Happy Holidays and Teenage Life Interrupted triumph at the 35th Tromsø International Film Festival

by 

- The Seed of the Sacred Fig, When Fall Is Coming and Holy Cow have also received prizes at the Arctic festival

Happy Holidays and Teenage Life Interrupted triumph at the 35th Tromsø International Film Festival
Director Scandar Copti receiving the Aurora Award for Happy Holidays, presented by competition jury members Iram Haq and Sean Price Williams (© Magdalena Wojtas)

The 35th edition of the Tromsø International Film Festival wrapped an exciting but uncharacteristically rainy week in Northern Norway with an awards ceremony on 18 January, honouring this year’s prizewinners and then continuing on for two additional days with encore screenings. After scooping major gongs at Thessaloniki and Marrakech, Scandar Copti’s Palestinian drama Happy Holidays [+see also:
film review
interview: Scandar Copti
film profile
]
received yet another top prize, with the director present to receive the Aurora Award for Best Film in the Tromsø competition programme. Seven juried awards were presented at the ceremony, while the more recent Tromsø Audience Award announcement was just made today, 20 January.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)
lessismore2025internal

This year’s competition programme was weighed up by Norwegian-Pakistani actress-screenwriter-director Iram Haq, US cinematographer-director Sean Price Williams and cultural festival founder Vasil Gjurovski. All films in the programme, made up of a rich variety pack of exciting titles from around the world, received their Norwegian premiere at the Arctic festival.

The festival’s flagship sidebar, Films from the North, is dedicated to shorts and features from or related to the Barents Region, High North and other circumpolar areas, including the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Canada or Iceland. The Tromsø Palm – Features was inaugurated last year after the Films from the North strand expanded to include features in 2019; all feature films must be having their Norwegian premiere.

And so, collecting the second annual Tromsø Palm – Features was Teenage Life Interrupted [+see also:
film review
film profile
]
by Åse Svenheim Drivenes, a conventionally shot but immensely sharp Tromsø-set documentary that follows two paediatricians at the University Hospital of North Norway treating four teenage girls with biomedically inexplicable chronic pain. This year’s features jury was composed of Þóra Ingólfsdóttir (director, National Film Archive of Iceland), Katja Gauriloff (Finnish filmmaker) and Morten Røsrud (Norwegian theatre director). The 2025 Tromsø Palm – Shorts went to In My Hand by Liselotte Wajstedt and Marja Helander, which explores different struggles and triumphs of the Sámi indigenous experience through the life of one man.

The festival’s designated FIPRESCI jury presented Norwegian novelist and filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud with the critics’ award for Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
film profile
]
, while the FICC (Fédération Internationale des Ciné-clubs), the international organisation for film societies and non-profit cinema, bestowed its prize – the Don Quixote Award – upon Louise Courvoisier’s Holy Cow [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Louise Courvoisier
film profile
]
, with an Honourable Mention going to Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s documentary Gaucho Gaucho. After a final tally of votes, the Tromsø Audience Award went to Baltasar Kormákur’s Icelandic love story Touch [+see also:
film review
film profile
]
, making it the fifth Icelandic film to win the festival’s public vote.

The full list of award winners at the 35th edition of Tromsø is as follows:

Aurora Award
Happy Holidays [+see also:
film review
interview: Scandar Copti
film profile
]
– Scandar Copti (Palestine/Germany/France/Italy/Qatar)

FIPRESCI Award
Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
film profile
]
– Dag Johan Haugerud (Norway)

Don Quixote Award
Holy Cow [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Louise Courvoisier
film profile
]
– Louise Courvoisier (France)
Honourable Mention

Gaucho Gaucho – Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw (USA/Argentina)

Norwegian Peace Film Award (NoFPA)
The Seed of the Sacred Fig [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Directors Talks @ European …
interview: Mohammad Rasoulof
film profile
]
– Mohammad Rasoulof (Germany/France/Iran)

Tromsø Palm – Shorts
In My Hand – Liselotte Wajstedt, Marja Helander (Norway/Sweden/Finland)

Tromsø Palm – Features
Teenage Life Interrupted [+see also:
film review
film profile
]
– Åse Svenheim Drivenes (Norway)

Faith in Film Award
When Fall Is Coming [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
– François Ozon (France)

Tromsø Audience Award
Touch [+see also:
film review
film profile
]
– Baltasar Kormákur (UK/Iceland/USA)

Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.

Privacy Policy