SAN SEBASTIAN: Pandora s Box, a moving story about sibling rivalry by Turkish director Yesim Ustaoglu, Saturday won the Golden Shell award for best film at the San Sebastian film festival.
One of the film s stars, 90-year-old French actress Tsilla Chelton, also jointly won the best actress award, for her role as a grandmother afflicted with Alzheimer s disease.
She shared the prize with American Melissa Leo, who starred as a mother abandoned by her husband in Frozen River, which won the top award at this year s Sundance Festival in the United States and had been among those tipped to take the Golden Shell.
The jury, chaired by American director Jonathan Demme, gave the best director award to Britain s Michael Winterbottom for his film Genova, starring Colin Firth as a man who moves to the Italian city of Genoa to start a new life with his two daughters.
Argentine Oscar Martinez won the award for best actor for his role in El Nido Vacio, ( The Empty Nest ) which also took the prize for best cinematography.
A total of 15 films were in competition for the Golden Shell at the 56th San Sebastian film festival in the coastal city in Spain s northern Basque Country.
At the closing ceremony, the organizers also paid tribute to Paul Newman, who died on Friday aged 83. Presenter Edurne Ormazabal described him as an actor who has influenced an era.
Filmed in part in the beautiful Turkish countryside, Pandora s Box, Ustaoglu s fourth film, recounts the story of two sisters and a brother in their 40s forced by their mother s disappearance to rediscover each other.
The siblings, who live in Istanbul, unite to search for their missing mother, but old tensions emerge during their journey and they realize that they know little about each other.
I thank my team, Tsilla Chelton and my family, Ustaoglu, visibly moved, said on receiving the award.
As often at the San Sebastian festival, the winning film was not among those tipped for the top award by critics, who preferred Still Walking, a portrait of family life by Japan s Hirokazu Kore-Eda, and Bullet in the Head, a controversial Spanish film by Jaime Rosales about Basque separatists.
The French comedy Louise-Michel, about factory employees who take revenge on their boss after being laid off, received the award for best screenplay.
The jury also rewarded Iranian director Samira Makhamalbaf with the Special Jury Prize for her work Two Legged-Horse.
Filmed in Afghanistan, it is the story of a boy who is hired to carry around the son of a man whose has lost his legs in a landmine explosion.
If this award was democracy, I could present it to people in my country, Iran, Makhamalbaf said afterwards.
She is the sister of Hana Makhmalbaf, whose film Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame won the Special Jury Prize at San Sebastian last year, and daughter of filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, co-screenwriter of Two-Legged Horse.
During the festival, actors Meryl Streep and Antonio Banderas were both presented with honorary Donostia Awards.
Last year, the jury headed by American author Paul Auster awarded the Golden Shell to Hong Kong director Wayne Wang for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. -AFP
