Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering won the Grand Prix — Crystal Globe, the top award, at the closing ceremony of the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF).
The Special Jury Prize went to Mads Mengel’s The Guest, starring Trine Dyrholm (The Girl With the Needle, Poison), Simon Bennebjerg (The Pact, Promised Land) and Josephine Park (The Nurse, Oxen).
The main competition jury lauded Fruit Gathering as “a lush and meditative portrait of work and friendship before morphing, unexpectedly and organically, into a harrowing drama of obsession and queer desire.” It also said that The Guest is “a squirmingly funny yet precisely modulated drama that subtly raises questions about motherhood, filial duty and mental illness.”
Mengel also won best director for The Guest, with the jury lauding him “for giving us a seat at the table with a superb ensemble of actors, orchestrated with great intelligence and tonal assurance.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s review of The Guest noted that “Trine Dyrholm gives a scorcher of a performance in a gutsy Danish party-gone-wrong drama,” also highlighting: “The most audacious move here may be Mengel and co-screenwriter Christian Bengtson’s choice to write something that will inevitably invite comparisons with Festen (The Celebration), arguably the most notorious Danish-language film of the last 30 years, which similarly revolved around a bougie gathering disrupted by angry revelations.
