Yesterday, in the Pearl Room of the Casino, the awards for the Giornate degli Autori were announced, the autonomous festival section now in its 23rd edition, born in 2004 within the Venice International Film Festival. As tradition dictates, this 2026 edition also featured three recognitions: the GdA Director’s Award, the Europe Cinemas Label, and the Audience Award.
The jury of the Giornate degli Autori, chaired by the Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón, by the director and editor Sara Fgaier, and by the cinema programmer and distributor Hania Mroué, awarded the GdA Director’s Award to A veces me entra tristeza, otras veces rebelión by María Aparicio. Here is the motivation:
One woman. One man. Encounters and missed opportunities. A possible love story. Two great performers. A film that tells the loneliness of the present, where intimate dimension and political charge intertwine, inviting us to reflect on work, immigration and privilege, through a delicate staging built on small gestures, rather than on grand events. The personal and the collective, fiction and documentary, history and the present merge into a single breath. We left the cinema deeply moved, touched by a sadness and a spirit of rebellion that do not oppose each other, but coexist, like two faces of the same disorientation.
The Europe Cinemas Label was awarded to Une femme aujourd’hui by Robert Guédiguian. The voting jury consisted of Maria Gesuato (Cinema Teatro Giardino, San Giorgio delle Pertiche, Italy), Vít Janeček (Atlas Cinema, Prague, Czech Republic), Aisling Kane (Light House Cinema, Dublin, Ireland) and Daniel Tollefsen Altamirano (Folkets Bio Umeå, Umeå, Sweden). The prize is dedicated to European-produced and co-produced films, and the recognition was justified as follows:
Une femme aujourd’hui intreccia con grande forza la dimensione intima e personale con quella politica e sociale, utilizzando l’esperienza della protagonista per esplorare la condizione più ampia delle donne nella società contemporanea e nella vita familiare. Con empatia, ma senza semplificazioni, Robert Guédiguian coglie le tensioni tra una libertà solo apparente, il successo e le persistenti aspettative sociali; tra l’indipendenza professionale, la sessualità, il desiderio di intimità e la necessità di vivere la propria vita secondo le proprie condizioni. Il film è altrettanto efficace nell’osservare la società, anche alla luce del passato coloniale, quanto nel rappresentare il mondo interiore della protagonista – i suoi dubbi, la sua vulnerabilità, la sua capacità di ribellarsi e la ricerca di una nuova direzione nella vita. Affronta temi importanti con un umorismo sorprendente, leggerezza e umanità, senza per questo attenuarne l’urgenza. Nonostante i diversi temi affrontati, il film mantiene dall’inizio alla fine una forte spinta narrativa, energia e tensione. È un film estremamente coinvolgente, e siamo convinti che il pubblico europeo lo accoglierà con grande calore.
The Audience Award, decided based on the preferences expressed by the audience in Sala Perla at the Palazzo del Casinò after the screenings of the official selection, was claimed by Balcanica by Nicola Sorcinelli with 76% of the audience’s preferences.
The Argentine director María Aparicio is at her third feature, while Robert Guédiguian has a much more consolidated career behind him. The French director is greatly loved by festival-goers and for decades collaborates with the same group of actors, primarily Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gérard Meylan and Ariane Ascaride.
Balcanica is a debut feature with an autobiographical flavor starring Matilda De Angelis. Here is the trailer for the film:
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