Cinema Komunisto Wins GOLD HUGO at Chicago International Film Festival
We are proud to announce that the 2011 Gold Hugo Award for Best Documentary at Chicago International Film Festival goes to CINEMA KOMUNISTO.
Mila Turajlić, the film’s director, had the honor of having her first feature doc in the international documentary competition together with such greats as Wim Wenders, Claude Lelouch, Frederick Wiseman and Werner Herzog. The Docufest selection of films competing for the Gold Hugo Award “went beyond the headlines in telling those true stories that surprise, entertain and challenge us”.
The announcement was made on Saturday(15th October), accompanied with the jury statement: “Gold Hugo goes to Cinema Komunisto (Serbia), an exquisite matching of form and content. This film uses cinema as both a metaphor and a mechanism for the telling of unique national, cultural, and personal histories. Archival and contemporary footage are deftly interwoven to yield a result that is at once intimate and universal.”
The Chicago International Film Festival “showcases the work of the world’s top filmmakers and fresh talent alike”. The films in its selections “meet a global standard of excellence” and compete for the Festival’s highest honor – the Gold Hugo Award. This year’s selection of more than 180 feature-length fiction films, documentaries and shorts was “one of the strongest in the past decade”. Cinema Komunisto found itself in competition with some of the most renowned filmmakers in the world, in a line-up that featured documentaries by Wim Wenders, Claude Lelouch, Frederick Wiseman, and Werner Herzog, and was singled out as a must-see film by Chicago Reader and Time Out Chicago. The film, which is the only Serbian film in this year’s program, will be screened one more time at the Best of the Fest Ceremony in Chicago on October 19th. www.cinemakomunisto.com