The American actress Jessica Chastain and a young Danish Flora Ofelia Hofmann have won, ex aequo, the award for the best leading performance at the 69 San Sebastian Festival. It is the first year that this award has been awarded without regard to gender distinction.
Chastain received the award for her role as an evangelical telepreacher over five decades in Michael Showalter’s “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” The 16-year-old Hofmann was awarded for bringing to life a 14-year-old girl with wishes for emancipation in a Danish village in the late 19th century in Tea Lindeburg’s debut feature film, “As in Heaven.”
The Golden Shell award went to the Romanian film “Blue moon”, the debut feature of the actress Alina Grigore ( Bucharest, 1984). The jury chaired by Dea Kulumbegashvili – winner last year with “Beginning” – has recognized her “commitment to cinematographic language”, her courage and her way of capturing “the ghost of freedom and the wild side of life”.
The Silver Shell for interpreters cast went to a group of boy protagonists of the cinematographic experiment of Jonás Trueba “Who prevents it.” The movie is a generational portrait recorded during more than five years of the lives of these boys, most of them amateur actors. The winners include Candela Recio, Pablo Hoyos, Silvio Aguilar, Pablo Gavira, Claudia Navarro, Marta Casado, Rony-Michelle Pinzaru and Javier Sanchez.