Films which had Lithuanian premieres in Kaunas Film Festival win EP LUX Prize

For the second year in a row, one of the films premiered in Lithuania at Kaunas International Film Festival has won the annual LUX Prize awarded by the European Parliament.

At the end of this year, the LUX Prize, worth about 87.000 EUR, was won by the film Welcome by the French director Philippe Lioret. The film premiered in Kaunas Film Festival in October earlier this year and became the audience favourite both in Kaunas and Vilnius.

The LUX award opened the doors for the film to the cinemas across the entire EU: the European Parliament will finance the subtitling of the winning film in all the 23 European Union's official languages.

The LUX Prize aims to encourage public debate on European integration, mitigate cultural and linguistic diversification among the member states, which often hinders acceptance of films from other countries, and to support diffusion of European films in the European Union.

Welcome is set in Calais, northern France, and shows a swimming instructor who chooses to help out a 17-year-old Kurdish refugee who needs to swim across the English Channel to join his girl friend who has already emigrated to London along with her family. The film captivates the viewers with nowadays social reality and sensitive issues of humanity.

“We are glad that the festival team’s high film selection standards and attention to the public issues correlate with the aims of European film professionals and decision makers within the field of culture to address and integrate people from the European Union and other regions through the language of film. Since 2007, when Kaunas International Film Festival was launched, one of our main goals has been to disseminate tolerance and encourage public debate not only on art, but also on actual social issues. The fact that the festival has anticipated the LUX Prize winners for a couple of years in a row shows that we have chosen the right way to reach our goals,” Kaunas Film Festival’s director Ilona Jurkonytė commented on the news about the LUX awards.

2008, the LUX Prize went to the Belgian film Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence) by the famous filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The film also had a Lithuanian premiere in Kaunas Film Festival last year and received a lot of approval from the festival’s viewers.

“Kaunas International Film Festival aims to bring films of high artistic and social value to Lithuanian audience,” Tomas Tengmark, the producer of the festival’s programme, said. “Last year we screened Le Silence de Lorna, which illustrates the grim reality of Belgian immigrants. Pierre Lioret’s Welcome has an even stronger position on the immigration situation in France. Protection of immigrants’ human rights is a burning issue in the EU and I hope that these films will help prevent shredding people’s lives. Beside social and political meanings, both films are of high artistic quality. Our festival’s viewers loved them both.”