'The Whistleblower' Wins Top Prize at Palm Springs Film Festival

Larysa Kondraki’s The Whistleblower, which stars Rachel Weisz as a U.N. peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia, was won the audience award for best narrative feature at the 22nd annual Palm Springs International Film Festival.

The awards were announced at a luncheon ceremony at Spencer’s Restaurant on Sunday.

The runner-up narrative films included Aftershock, Goethe, The Hedgehog, Paper Birds and Simple Simon.

Louder Than a Bomb, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel’s film about a poetry slam festival in Chicago, received the audience award for best documentary feature.

The doc runners-up were Bill Cunningham New York, Jane’s Journey, A Not So Still Life, Waste Land and Wild Horse, Wild Ride.

The festival, which formally ends on Monday, screened 205 films from 69 countries, including 41 of the 65 foreign language entries for this year’s Academy Awards.  

A jury of international critics reviewed the foreign-language submissions and gave the FIPRESCI award for best foreign language film of the year to France’s Of Gods and Men, directed by Xavier Beauvois.  

Lars Rosing received the FIPRESCI award for best actor “for his affecting portrayal of a young man facing death against the stark landscape of Greenland” in Otto Rosing and Torben Bech’s Nuummioq. Anne Coesens received the FIPRESCI award for best actress “for her intense and uncompromising performance as an immigrant facing an inhumane legal system” in Olivier Masset-Depasse’s Illegal.  

The New Voices/New Visions jury, which looked at 13 new international talents making their feature film debut at the festival, gave its award to Mikkel Munch-Fals’ Danish film Nothing’s All Bad. It also gave special mentions to the films Sound of Noise and 40.  

The John Schlesinger Award for an outsstanding new documentary went to Summer Pasture, directed by Lynn True and Nelson Walker.  

Iciar Bollain’s Even the Rain won the Bridging the Borders Award. The film is Spain’s best foreign language film Oscar submission.