The Lux Award, a film prize awarded by the European Parliament, revealed the five finalists for the 2024 honor at the Venice Film Festival on Friday.
The shortlist already includes acclaimed favorites from the Berlin, Cannes and Sundance film festivals.
On the AdamantsThe French documentary by Nicolas Philibert about a unique psychiatric treatment center based on a ship anchored on the Seine in Paris won the Golden Bear for best film in Berlin. The mental health facility caters to the creative needs of its patients and provides an outlet for their artistic expression.
Another non-fiction movie, Smoke sauna Sisterhood by the Estonian director Anna Hints, was also on the shortlist this year. This year, the film won the directorial award for Hints in the world cinema documentary category at Sundance. The film tells the story of a group of women who come together in the safe darkness of a smoke sauna to share their innermost thoughts and secrets. It is Estonia’s official 2024 Oscar entry in the Best International Feature Film category.
Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s 20,000 species of bees, another Berlin title – which won the Silver Bear for best performance for Sofía Otero, who stars as Lucía, an eight-year-old child experiencing gender dysmorphia – is in the running for this year’s Lux Award, as is Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen leavesanother laconic romance by the Finnish master, who won the jury prize at Cannes.
The shortlist of five films is rounded off by Ilker Çatak The teacher’s roomwhich premiered in Berlin and is the German entry for Best International Feature Film for the 2024 Oscar race.
The finalists were chosen by a Lux panel of film experts from across Europe. The Lux Award was created in 2007 to help distribute high artistic quality EU films that reflect the cultural diversity in Europe and beyond and touch on what are considered to be the EU’s main values, including human dignity, equality , non-discrimination, inclusion, tolerance, justice and solidarity
European moviegoers and Members of the European Parliament now have until March 2024 to vote for this year’s winner, with each group – the European audience and Members of the European Parliament – responsible for 50 per cent of the final result .
