Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry wins top Swiss film award

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, by Georgian director Elene Naveriani, portrays Ethéro, a single 48-year-old woman living in a small tradiational Georgian village. KEYSTONE/© KEYSTONE / MICHAEL BUHOLZER

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, by director Elene Naveriani, won the prize for best Swiss feature film at the Swiss Film Awards held in Zurich on Friday.

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, by Georgian director Elene Naveriani, portrays Ethéro, a single 48-year-old woman living in a small traditional Georgian village. The movie also won awards for best screenplay and best editing.

Bisons by Fribourg director Pierre Monnard also picked up several awards on Friday: best actor for Karim Barras, best film score for Nicolas Rabaeus and best cinematography for Joseph Areddy.

Set in the Jura mountains, Bisons tells the story of a young Swiss wrestling champion who is lured by his brother into a series of clandestine fights to raise money to save the family farm.

Maud Wyler in La voie royale by Valais director Frédéric Mermoud won the prize for best supporting actress. This film portrays a young provincial girl in a French science preparatory school, which gives access to France’s elite higher-education institutions. Maud Wyler plays the role of one of the teachers.

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The prize for best actress went to Ella Rumpf in Le théorème de Marguerite. The Franco-Swiss actress had already won the César for best new actress last February. Ella Rumpf plays Marguerite, a student faced with the failure of her thesis. She gives up everything and becomes a shoe saleswoman before discovering a gift for mah-jongg.

The award for best documentary went to Lisa Gerig’s documentary L’audition. Four rejected asylum seekers relive their hearing during the asylum procedure. L’audition won the Solothurn Prize last January.

Armat by Elodie Dermange from Geneva won best animated film, and La gravidité by Jela Hasler was named best short film.

Composer Nicolas Rabaeus, from Geneva, won two prizes for Bisons by Pierre Monnard and The Land Within by Fisnik Maxville. Last year, he won the Swiss Film Prize for his soundtrack to Carmen Jaquier’s Foudre.

Swiss Culture Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider gave the Swiss Film Prize of Honour to producer Robert Boner. The 75-year-old has produced over fifty films, including Yves Yersin’s Les petites fugues and documentaries by Richard Dindo and Jean-Stéphane Bron.

This year, all the nominees in the two main categories (drama and documentary) are co-productions of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC), which invests around CHF50 million in independent Swiss film production every year.

The prizes have been awarded by the Federal Office of Culture since 1998, in collaboration with SBC, the “Quartz” association, Swiss Films (the Swiss film promotion agency), the Swiss Film Academy and the Solothurn Film Festival.

Adapted from French by DeepL/sb

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