Unanimously, the Jury of the Exhibition has awarded the prize for best film to "Unrest", by Cyril Schäublin, for being a film “untimely. This film is a mystery, it is both remote and current. It has an extraordinary staging that sustains the story and what happens optically throughout the film deserves a concentrated study of the use of shots, mediums and generals, as well as the very close-ups used to understand the microscopic mechanisms with which the old 19th century clocks were built. What Unrest evokes takes up the secret link between cinema and the world.”
"Unrest" tells how in the seventies of the 19th century, a young Piotr Kropotkin arrives in exile in Switzerland from Russia. There he encounters a very particular circumstance: there is not a single way to order time, but many. In the country of high-precision clocks, time has not yet been homogenized. Thus, the time is different depending on who regulates it: the large factories, the railway service or those responsible for the mail. In this environment, the political struggle of the emerging anarchist movements is linked to the problem of time management.
The young jury prize of the Lanzarote Film Festival has been for 'Soy libre', by Laure Portier, and the special mention has been taken by 'Kristina' by Nikola Spasic. In the short film section, 'Cruce de caminos: canarios filmmakers', the winning title has been 'Bancal' by Rafael Montezuma. The members of the jury have highlighted that “it carries with it the dimensions and sensations of which an entire life and its cycle are composed. Simple, frank and poetic like the wind, and like it resonates. With force”.
The ruling, argued this Saturday before the spectators in an open and transparent way, is already a sign of identity of the Lanzarote Film Festival.
In this twelfth edition of the Lanzarote Film Festival, the jury has valued the capacity that 'Unrest' has “to be a film that can belong to the end of a century and that, at the same time, enigmatically can be from our present. In addition, its ostensible political position not only concerns how it conceives work and how it can cinematographically outline the awareness of workers and the vindication of their rights. In the winning film, the sounds tune a melody of emancipation that does not belong to anyone and whose evocation takes up the secret link between cinema and the world.”
Regarding the special mention, this year, according to the Jury itself, the quality of the four remaining films was so high that the choice of the four was proposed during the open debate because “all equally deserved a distinction and the fact of choosing one over another was an aesthetic injustice. This has not been a gesture of democratic courtesy and even less of an intellectual laziness. The four films that finally do not obtain a mention, but that are also worthy of being highlighted, have been discussed for more than 45 minutes”. However, the Jury added “the rules of the Exhibition cannot be transgressed. Even so, we want to record that all these films improve contemporary cinema and illuminate the least thought-out recesses of the human experience”.
The winning Canarian short film, 'Bancal, is about a man who builds stone walls in the forest. Each stone that forms the wall of Bancal is indispensable. With strength and intelligence, maestro Santiago chooses and molds them, creating a kind of writing. Like the representation of an idea that has been revealed. Perhaps a constant search for what it means to transit life.
The Jury of the Lanzarote Film Festival that has made this decision is made up of: Roger Koza, member of FIPRESCI, film critic in various media and programmer of several film festivals, as well as artistic director of cinematographic events. Cintia Gil, who was director of Doclisboa and Sheffield DocFest. She has participated in juries of many film festivals, such as the Berlinale, Cairo, Mar del Plata, Jerusalem, Turin, Taiwan or Seville. The third component is Luis Miranda, who has directed the Las Palmas de Gran Canarias International Film Festival since 2015.