Hungarian school drama wins main LIFFe prize

The film portrays a strict school system with no room for concessions, a reason for which it was made without state support but with 19 co-producers.

The team, starting with no money, felt it was time for solidarity and to show the times full of deceit and oppression not only in Hungary but elsewhere too, he said.

The LIFFe's international jury said that by focussing on one of the key institutions in society Szimler showed the painful problems of contemporary Hungary.

"He did it with freshness and humour, but also with precision and poignancy. In doing so, he rose above the current social critique and paid homage to sacrifice and freedom in his mockery of the stupidity, meanness, cowardice, narrow-mindedness and aggressiveness of human nature."

Szimler's film has received several awards before, including a special mention and the best actress award in Locarno.

In a statement for the STA, Szimler said he had built it on his own experience while also visiting several schools and talking to ten-year-olds, as well as to teachers who were fired for political reasons.

He often gets questions in which period the film is set, but he said it is set in contemporary Hungary, where nothing has changed in the last few decades.

"The situation in the film is the same as it is in reality, and the attitude to children is the same as it was when I was a child, perhaps even worse, as the government has stripped most of the schools of autonomy," he said.

The same jury, consisting of Taki Mumladze, Christos Nikou and Darko Sinko, gave a special mention to Good One, an independent American film about a broken relationship by India Donaldson.

Several other films received awards by other juries.

Oyu by Japanese director Atsushi Hirai became the best short film at LIFFe, and Aqueronte by Spanish director Manuel Munoz Rivas received a special mention.

The FIPRESCI award went to April, a socially critical film about the right to abortion by Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili.

Kinotrip's youth jury rewarded feature film Toxic by Lithuanian director Saule Bliuvaite, which was praised as "a timeless documentary that questions the idealised image of the female body, which can sometimes be fatal".

The Slovenian art cinema network's award went to The Other Way Round by Spanish director Jonas Trueba, and the audiences' favourite is Manas, Marianne Brennand's debut feature film about child sexual abuse in the Amazon Rainforest.

LIFFe has offered to film buffs 91 features and three sections of shorts films, with the last screenings scheduled for Sunday.

The Retrospective was dedicated to Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras while the Tribute honoured late Japanese modernist master Yasuzo Masumura.

The festival's programme manager Simon Popek sees the 35th LIFFe as a success despite a somewhat lower number of screenings and too few cinemas in Ljubljana.

"But we can be happy because we'll probably be somewhere around last year's attendance figures," he told the STA. Some 36,000 are expected to have attended it.