The Raid(above), Gareth Evans's Indonesian action film, is the first picture to win both the audience prize and the Dublin Film Critics Circle's best film award at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. It's an extraordinary film with an extraordinary story behind it. Evans, a young Welshman, travelled to Jakarta with an empty knapsack and somehow managed to knock together a violent epic.
"There was no way we wanted this to look like a film made by a foreigner coming into Jakarta," he told Reel News. "We've been blown away by the response we've been getting. We could never have anticipated that." The Raidis currently down for release on May 18th in these territories.
Nuala: A Life and Death, a moving documentary on the career of Nuala O'Faolain, took the best Irish film prize from the DFCC. Michael Fuith, terrifyingly blank in this week's Michael, won the award for best actor. Greta Gerwig, hilariously pretentious in Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress,was honoured as best actress.
As ever, the DFCC presented a "discovery award" named in honour of Michael Dwyer, this paper's late film correspondent. This year, the honour went to Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde for his collaboration with Pat Collins on the singular docudrama Silence.
Guests at the prize-giving included Gareth Evans, the great Iranian director Marjane Satrapi and Marian Finucane, a prime force in the creation of Nuala: A Life and Death.
