“THE MOTHER” AWARDED IN DENMARK

Last weekend brought another award for Łukasz Ostalski for his feature film “The Mother”. Yesterday evening the film made its way onto the winners list at the 38th Odense IFF.

The Odense festival has been offering reviews of the best short films every summer since 1975. There are two main competitions – the Danish Competition and the International Competition. Four teams of jurors – the International Competition Jury, the Danish Competition Jury the Animation Jury and the Youth Jury – award as many as eight prizes every year. Prizes in the main international competition are: the Grand Prix, the Storyteller Award (for author of the best story) and the Artist Award (for film with the best artistic expression). This year, as many as 58 films were brought to the audience in the international programme, representing cinema of 25 countries. A total number of 3000 applications had been submitted.

Two Polish films were invited to compete in the Odense festival – an animation “Lost senses” by Marcin Wasilewski and the above mentioned fiction film by Łukasz Ostalski – “The Mother”. During the closing ceremony of the festival, winning films were announced by jury made up by Jennifer Fox (director), Miliad Alami (director) and Lisabeth Wulff (actress). The Grand Prix of the festival went to Finnish director Mikko Kuparinen for his film “Sirocco”, and the Artist Award was given to an Ethiopian film “Adamt” (dir. Zelalem Woldemariam). Łukasz Ostalski's graduation film “The Mother” brought him the Storyteller Award.

Małgorzata – a prominent politician in her daily job – sets of for the cabin by the lake, knowing that her drug-addicted son needs help. Małgorzata asks her daughter for support. Upon arriving, they find him half-conscious and discover a badly mutilated body of a young girl. In the face of the tragedy, things grow complicated between them, causing old grudges to boil over. The mother must make the most difficult decision in her life.

It is the fourth international award won so far by the film directed by the Gdynia Filmschool graduate. To the day, it scored awards at festivals in Tampere, Wroclaw and Pula. In September, the film is going to be shown at festivals in Batumi and Helsinki among the others.

International promotion of the film is supported by the Krakow Film Foundation.

More information about this year's winners of the Odense festival may be found here