Woman At War And The Guilty Win At Valladolid

At the 63rd Valladolid International Film Festival on Saturday, Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir was awarded Best Actress for her role in Benedikt Erlingsson’s (Of Horses and Men) second feature Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð).

Woman at War, which premiered during International Critics’ Week at Cannes, follows Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir), an independent woman who declares war on the local aluminium industry. She resorts to sabotage and is willing to risk everything to protect the Icelandic highlands, until a Ukrainian orphan enters her life.

Since its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won four awards during Critics‘ Week, Woman at War has been shortlisted for the European Film Awards, received nominations for the Nordic Council Film Prize and LUX Film Prize, and is Iceland’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards.

Meanwhile, the Miguel Delibes Award for Best Screenplay at Valladolid was presented to Gustav Möller’s debut feature, The Guilty (Den skyldige), which is Denmark’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and has sold to more than 90 countries.

The Guilty finds a police officer expecting a sleepy shift as an emergency dispatcher when he answers a call from a kidnapped woman. Confined to the police station, he is forced to use others as his eyes and ears to find her as his personal demons conspire against him.

The Valladolid International Film Festival (Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid) was conceived as Religious Film Week in 1956 to coincide with Easter celebrations, but was relaunched in 1973 without religious connotations and became an important showcase for independent and auteur films. Also known as Seminci, the shortened name arose from the need to use fewer words in telegrams.