It goes to Bertrand Bonello’s La Bête (France, Canada 2023) the Efebo d’Oro Award for the best film based on a literary work at the 45th edition of the Efebo d’Oro Film Festival. Awarding the prize was the jury composed of Giorgio Vasta (writer and screenwriter), Marica Stocchi (film producer) and Stefano Savona (director), who were joined, as per the Festival’s regulations, by the head of the “Research Center for Fiction and Cinema” or its president Paola Catania.

The jury gave the following reasons for its choice: “By telling the story of Gabrielle and Louis-with a temporal excursion from the early twentieth century leading up to the mid-twenty-first century, and moving from the Paris of the past to a Los Angeles of the present to a Paris, again, of the future-Bonello succeeds in shaping a film that engages in dialogue with the cinematic imagination without ever ceasing to be radically personal. Of the French director’s film, the ability to capture a nuance that in our experience of the contemporary is as nodal as it is elusive stands out powerfully: human life is the constant foreboding of something that is about to happen and never does, of something that affects us intimately and that we cannot name – that we cannot name precisely because it affects us so intimately. This insight-which is at the heart of Henry James’ magnificent short story from which Bonello takes his cue-in La Bête finds a fully cinematic expression. In La Bête, everything speaks-the actors’ direction, their performance, the costumes, the decòr, the editing, the staging in general-and everything looms: everything is about to happen: everything nurtures a sense of inexhaustible mystery. Cinema-and in this, too, Bonello’s film is exemplary-is always what is about to happen (and not happen, and happen).”

To “Sieben Winter in Teheran” (Seven Winters in Tehran) by Steffi Niederzoll (France – Germany, 2023) has been awarded the “Efebo Prospettive Award for first or second film” by a Jury composed of Sara Serraiocco (actress), Francesco Costabile (director) and Alain Parroni ( director), who explained its choice as follows: «For the extraordinary ability of the director to tell the troubled story of a young woman and of her dignity in a sensitive and reflective way. The audacity with which Steffi Niederzoll tackles this debut, highlights an honest and sincere look at the brutality of the judicial system and the power dynamics in Iran. The film offers, through a great awareness of the film language, a glimpse into the life of a young woman, highlighting her courage in the face of a legal system and the difficulties faced by her family. It is a work that goes beyond the story of a tragic event, becoming a powerful tool for reflection on a conflictual and violent society like contemporary Iran and on the power of the cinematographic medium. The combination of smuggled film materials, emotional interviews and evocative reconstructions creates a cinematic experience that inspires both documentary and fiction, and deeply affects the souls of the viewers.” The same jury has assigned a special mention aBye Bye Tibériade/Bye Bye Tiberias(Bye Bye Tiberias) by Lina Soualem (France, Palestine, Belgium, Qatar 2023), with the following motivation:“For the ability to transform an intimate and personal journey into the dramatic story of an entire people, in a land as Palestine that for more than seventy years has seen its borders and its identities crumble, and leave behind a landscape made of ruins and unfinished stories. A film that shows us, with poignant honesty, the wounds and consequences of a war that indelibly marked an entire family and four generations of women.”

Also to Bye Bye Tibériade/Bye Bye Tiberias goes the Michele Mancini Award – named after the film critic and essayist, as well as director of the Film Laboratory of the University of Palermo and professor of the History of the Performing Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo in the 1980s -, awarded by students from the film courses of the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo and the Sicilian Branch of the Experimental Center of Cinematography (among those in the “Efebo Perspectives” section). The jury gave the following reasons for its choice: “For its ability to tell from an intimate and unusual point of view the testimony of four generations of Palestinian women and for the director’s courage in putting her personal story at the service of History.”
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“Sieben Winter in Teheran” (Seven Winters in Tehran) by Steffi Niederzoll also receives the “ANDE Palermo Award” (tributed by the Palermo Department of the National Association of Voting Women), with the following motivation: «For its essential narration, where each word has its own precise place and a value that is both factual and symbolic. For the narration of the persevering affirmation of the truth by Reyaneh Jabbari and by her family, even where women’s rights are tragically denied: for the profound value of the testimony.”