Early Winners Revealed For European Film Awards

Although the 29th European Film Awards do not take place until 10th December, several production awards have been announced early, with Martin Zandvliet’s Land Of Mine and Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune taking the spoils.

Camilla Hjelm Knudsen won European Cinematographer 2016 (Prix Carlo di Palma) for Land Of Mine, about German prisoners of war who were ordered to remove more than two million mines from the coast of Denmark with their bare hands. Land Of Mine also picked up the awards for European Costume Designer and European Hair & Make-up Artist.

The jury said: “Camilla Hjelm Knudsen’s cinematography creates a tension that supports the uniquely suggestive atmosphere of the film with great perfection. From the first moment, the visual language captures and impresses the spectator, demonstrating in great subtlety how much composition and lighting can contribute to the dramaturgy of a film and support story and characters in an unobtrusive way.”

Meanwhile, European Editor 2016 has been awarded to Anne Østerud & Janus Billeskov Jansen for The Commune, in which a bored woman persuades her husband to start a collective in his inherited childhood home in Copenhagen. The project results in friendship, love and togetherness until a love affair puts the close-knit community to the test.

The jury said: “The editing creates a light and humoristic atmosphere and then changes this into a feeling of losing control, when all that was planned by the heroine is turning against her. While doing all this, the editing also underlines what is so essential to this film in particular: the movement between the single person and the commune at every given moment of the film.”

The 29th European Film Awards take place on 10th December 2016 in Wroclaw, Poland.