The Dinard British Film Festival is over for another year. But before it closed, the juries announced the winners of the various prizes. Here is a rundown.
Limbo by Ben Sharrock won both the Hitchcock d’Or Ciné + and the feature-film audience prize. The film was selected for the 2020 Cannes Festival (which didn’t take place). It is a satirical look at the situation of people who have asked for refugee status in the UK and are “in limbo” while waiting for their application to be processed. They aren’t allowed to work and are housed wherever space can be found. In this case, on a remote island in the Scottish Western Isles. The film focuses on Omar, a young Syrian oud player who has had to leave his family behind, and a miscellaneous group of other refugees. Limbo will have a cinematic release next May.
The Hitchcock for the best performance went jointly to Nika McGuigan and Nora-Jane Noon, who portrayed sisters in Wildfire by Cathy Brady.
The film is set on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland in the modern day but the events of the Troubles haven’t gone away. Director Brady accepted the prize in memory of McGuigan, who tragically died shortly after the film wrapped.
The special Barrière jury prize went to the coming-of-age story Sweetheart, by Marley Morrison. Anyone who has ever been a teenager, or the parent of one, can identify with the excruciating self-consciousness of an adolescent on a family holiday better adapted to her younger brother. Despite her reluctance to go to this old-fashioned holiday camp, AJ will find holiday romance there.
And the short-film audience prize went to Bound by Joe Carter, a tale of too much drink and a great deal of embarrassment on a night out in Edinburgh.
