This category highlights those works which dared challenging the establishment and took technical, creative or narrative risks, venturing to explore and push the boundaries of their film’s subjects or making the medium evolve.
This year’s most innovative offerings feature Jia Zhangke’s tales of the clash between capitalist and traditional values in contemporary China, told through four different stories taken from real news that shocked his country. Chaotic, violent, and laced with dark humor, sometimes reminiscent of Tarantino, ‘A Touch Of Sin’ was an impressive achievement; Nouvelle vague pioneer Jean-Luc Godard delivered another of his visual poems in ‘Goodbye To Language’, as unique and impenetrable as any of his latest works, this time exploring the possibilities of 3D with groundbreaking results; Philippine helmer Lav Díaz confirmed himself as one of the maximum representatives of slow cinema, a political statement against Hollywood aesthetic and time constrictions imposed upon filmmakers across the globe, his four hour adaptation of Dostoyevsky ‘s Crime and Punishment, ‘Norte, The End Of History’, mixed philosophy, his country’s social, historical and political context; extraordinary visuals and powerful drama ; Lars Von Trier’s freely explored the limits of female sexuality through metaphors and comparisons to completely unrelated subjects in the two-parter “Nymphomaniac” earning an even higher level of controversy than usual; Alain Guiraudie did the same with gay sex, in explicit but not exploitative manner, through an intelligent metaphor about AIDS at his core and the structure of a crime film, at times recalling the best Hitchcock, in “Strangers by the lake’; Taiwanese master Ming-Liang Sang beautifully shot and almost dialogue free depiction of extreme urban poverty ‘Stray Dogs’ and the spectacularly sensorial experience that was Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Michael Faber’s sci-fi novel ‘Under the Skin’.
Check all the nominees’ trailers below and Vote for your favourites here
A TOUCH OF SIN (Zhangke Jia) |
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GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (Jean-Luc Godard) |
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NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY (Lav Díaz) |
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NYMPHOMANIAC PART 1 (Lars Von Trier) |
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STRANGER BY THE LAKE (Alain Guiraudie) |
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STRAY DOGS (Ming-Liang Tsai) |
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UNDER THE SKIN (Jonathan Glazer) |