Dragon Award Best Nordic Film

Göteborg International Film Festival’s award for best Nordic film, Dragon Award Best Nordic Film, has a prize sum of one million SEK. The award is one of the largest in the world and is distributed at the Dragon Awards Gala, on Saturday, February 2.

Last year’s winner of the Dragon Award Best Nordic Film and hence one million SEK was Company Orheim by Arild Andresen.

Dragon Award Best Nordic Film is presented by Ernströmgruppen and is co-funded by Ernströmgruppen, Västra Götaland and the City of Gothenburg.

This year’s nominated films are:

All that matters is past

Directed by: Sara Johnsen (Norway)
Janne meets William after many years of separation. She leaves her family to live with him in a cabin by the river and they recreate the feeling of love and lust that they had as children, being sweethearts playing in the woods.
By coincidence a canoeist finds Janne extremely weakened in the forest where two dead men lie beside her.

I Belong

Directed by: Dag Johan Haugerud  (Norway)
A nurse starts speaking English when she is nervous. A translator compromises her integrity when translating a bad novel. A woman turns down a one million-crown inheritance because of pride. Three women all have a small soft spot in their personality, and are hit hard when their idiosyncrasies meet the light of day. A tragic comedy about the human factor.

The deep

Directed by: Baltasar Kormákur (Iceland)
On a cold night in March 1984, a few miles off the south coast of Iceland, a fishing boat sank along with its crew. Miraculously, one of its members survived. After six hours battling the ocean for his life, the exhausted young titan, washes ashore, only to find himself in a deadly lava field.

A Hijacking

Directed by: Tobias Lindholm (Denmark)
In A Hijacking Tobias Lindholm turns his attention to a current topic – piracy at sea. The cargo ship MV Rozen is heading for harbour when it is boarded and captured by pirates in the Indian Ocean. Amongst the men on board are the ship’s cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk) and the engineer Jan (Roland Møller), who along with the rest of the seamen are taken hostage in a cynical game of life and death. With the demand for a ransom of millions of dollars, a psychological drama unfolds between the CEO of the shipping company (Søren Malling) and the Somali pirates.

Faro

Directed by: Fredrik Edfeldt (Sweden)
A father has killed a man and will shortly be arrested and sent to prison. His young daughter will be taken into care. She is his definition, and he for all his failings, is the ground under her feet. They are inseparable and have nothing but each other. Unwilling to give up their freedom they escape into the woods.
The first few weeks are happy – spent on working and surviving, feeding themselves and finding shelter. The forest tests them to their very limits, but also shows them another face which is beautiful and gentle. Somehow in nature things become clearer. At the end of the summer their roles have reversed. A young girl has grown up and a strong man has turned into a helpless boy. Meanwhile, the police have tracked them down.
Faro is director Fredrik Edfeldt and writer Karin Arrhenius second film together after critically acclaimed The Girl.

8-ball

Directed by: Aku Louhimies (Finland)
Director Aku Louhimies won the Dragon Award Best Nordic Film at GIFF 2005 with Frozen Land (screenplay by Jari Rantala). The two are now cooperating once again in this realistic film about the consequences of gangster life. Pike has just been released from prison and is trying to create a new life for herself and her little daughter, when her charismatic ex-boyfriend shows up.

Before Snowfall

Directed by: Hisham Zaman (Norway)
Siyar wraps the body in plastic, crawls into the oil tank on a truck and travels across the border between Iraq and Turkey. He is in search of his sister Nermin who escaped from her upcoming wedding in Kurdistan, Iran. Arriving in Istanbul, Siyar meets Evin, a girl dressed as a guy, living on the streets. Evin dreams of living with her father in Germany. Siyar has a secret mission he gradually begins to question. GIFF screened Hisham Zaman’s short Bawke in 2006. This is his feature debut.

Nordvest

Directed by: Michael Noer (Denmark)
Nordvest is a gangster film set in the suburbs of Copenhagen. Casper, the oldest of 3 siblings, survives life on the streets by committing burglaries for the neighbourhood boss, Jamal. When Casper gets an offer to work for Jamal’s rival Björn, he jumps at the chance for a better life, making his way into a world of drugs and prostitution. As things escalate between Björn and Jamal, Casper finds himself and his family dead centre of a conflict, that threatens to destroy them.

Download press images here.

For more information contact:
Ulrika Grönérus, PR-chef
Göteborg International Film Festival
0708-643736
ulrika.gronerus@giff.se