[Video] 49th Denver Film Festival Winners Announced: 'La Bola Negra' Takes Best Feature Film
The 49th Denver Film Festival announced its award winners on November 3. Held in Denver, Colorado, the festival ran for 11 days from October 22 to November 1, screening 129 films from around the world, with winners chosen by audience ballots and juries of film industry professionals.
The festival's top juried honor, the Krzysztof Kieslowski Award for Best Feature Film, went to 'La Bola Negra,' a Spanish-French production directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo. The jury praised it as an extraordinary work of imagination about love in the face of fear that examines intimate human struggles on an epic historical scale. Actress Sophie Okonedo also received special recognition for her performance in 'Clarissa.'
The Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary went to 'Whispers in May,' directed by Dongnan Chen and collaborators. The international production explores female friendship, and jurors praised how it challenges assumptions about agency and authorship in a formally daring and emotionally authentic rendering of a last adventure before adulthood.
In the Audience Awards, opening-night film 'I Play Rocky,' directed by Peter Farrelly, won Best Narrative Feature; the film tells the story of Sylvester Stallone creating and playing Rocky. Best Documentary went to 'Good Help,' directed by Rebekah Henderson and Lilah Park, which chronicles Denver residents coming together to support thousands of newly arrived Venezuelan migrants. The Audience Award for Best Short Film went to 'We Were Here,' directed by Pranav Bhasin.
The True Grit Award, celebrating Colorado filmmaking, went to Mara Gasbarro Tasker's 'The River,' an examination of water scarcity and the people confronting its consequences, with special mentions for 'Watch You Rise' and 'Ideas of Order.' In the short-film competitions, Altay Ulan Yang's 'Hyena' won the Grand Jury Prize and Bruce Tetsuya's 'End of Things' received the True Grit Short Film Award.
The festival also awarded $20,000 in documentary finishing grants through its Music on Film-Film on Music program, including $12,500 for 'Holding on to Water' and $7,500 for 'Asha Puthli: Taking Space.' Other festival honorees included actors John Leguizamo, Carrie Coon, John Cho, D'Arcy Carden and Indya Moore, along with filmmaker Liz Sargent. The festival will return in 2027 for its 50th anniversary edition.
(Source: Denver Film Festival)
Source: Denver Film Festival
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：Denver 市政礼堂，Denver Performing Arts Complex 内 Ellie Caulkins Opera House 所在建筑，本届电影节开幕之夜在此举行。Jeffrey Beall 摄，CC BY-SA 3.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: The Denver Municipal Auditorium, home of the Ellie Caulkins Opera House at the Denver Performing Arts Complex, where this year's festival opened. By Jeffrey Beall, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
