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Polish-language drama wins Listapad film festival`s top prize

 

Ida, a Polish-language drama by Warsaw-born British director Pawel Pawlikowski, has won the Grand Prix at the 20th Listapad International Film Festival, which took place in Minsk between November 1 and November 8.

The co-production of Poland`s Opus Film, Denmark`s Phoenix Film Investments and Britain`s Fandango Portobello also clinched the film critics` top prize, Srebra Listapada, as well as the international jury`s best cinematography award.

The presidential award "For Humanism and Spirituality in Cinema" went to Ukraine`s Oleksandr Parkhomenko for his movie Luka (Luke).

According to the organizers, more than 40,000 people attended the Listapad film screenings.

Ida is a slow, low-key, old-fashioned movie about identity, religion and dealing with a dark past. Shot in beautiful black and white and a nowadays rarely used aspect ratio of 4:3, the film is set in the early 1960s in Poland and has a particular sense of this period, in which the shadow of the war was still ubiquitous.

Luka tells the story of Archbishop Luka (Valentin Voyno-Yasenetsky), who was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. Voyno-Yasenetsky moves to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, together with his wife and four small children in 1917 amid a civil war and foreign military intervention and works there as a surgeon. After losing his spouse to tuberculosis and narrowly avoiding execution himself, Voyno-Yasenetsky becomes a priest who divides his time between his church ministry and medical practice. //BelaPAN