Embers by Claire Carré is the winner of the Asteroide Award (Best Science Fiction Feature Film). The Award was conferred by Trieste Science+Fiction Festival International Jury, whose members were journalist and film critic Mauro Gervasini, London FrightFest programmer Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Pedro Souto, Director of MOTELX – Lisbon International Horror Film Festival. Here is the Jury’s motivation for awarding the Asteroide to Embers, a US and Poland co-production already described as one of the most memorable indie sci-fi films of the last decade, in which the survivors of a global epidemics try to make sense of their lives in a world plagued by the loss of memory: “This is a film that is taking science fiction and the fantastic in a different direction. One that asks (but doesn’t always seek to answer) questions about who we are: as individuals, as family, friends and lovers, and how human existence can find itself in a single moment. This film is a timely allegory on human behaviour, intense emotion and the unknown future”.
The Méliès d’argent Award for Best European Fantastic Feature Film went to Sum of Histories by Lukas Bossuyt. The Award was conferred by the Jury, whose members were screenwriter Isabella Aguilar, director Fabrizio Roy Bava and TV writer and documentarist Carlo Modesti Pauer, “for showing the compelling interlacement of the characters’ lives within the sci-fi classic trope of timeline alteration and at the same providing an intriguing analysis of the latest discoveries in the field of quantum physics”.
As for the European Fantastic Shorts section, the audience awarded the Méliès d’argent Award for Best European Fantastic Short to the Bulgarian short Getting Fat in a Healthy Way by Kevork Aslanyan.
The Audience Award went to Moonwalkers by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet.
The Nocturno Nuove Visioni Award, conferred each year by the editorial staff of Nocturno – the Italian magazine most highly regarded by fans of genre cinema – to the most interesting and original genre film within the selection of Trieste Science+Fiction Festival, was awarded to I am not a Serial Killer by Billy O’Brien “for the unusual combination of dark humour, horror and coming-of-age story, and for succeeding in making our next-door Monsters and the Monsters within us co-exist”.
The Stars’ War – Web Critics Award to the best debut feature, in collaboration with BadTaste, Cineblog, CineClandestino, CineLapsus, Long Take, Quinlan and Sentieri Selvaggi, was assigned to Under the Shadow by Babak Anvari.
The CineLab Award, in collaboration with DAMS – Discipline delle arti della musica e dello spettacolo, Corso di studi interateneo Università degli Studi di Udine and Università di Trieste, was conferred to the short film of the Spazio Corto section Djinn Tonic by Domenico Guidetti with the following motivation: “Djinn Tonic shows us the great potential of Italian film industry and a way of expressing, through a simple idea, the profound fickleness of our compulsions“.
The CineLab Jury has also awarded a special mention to the feature film Monolith by Ivan Silvestrini “for being an example of high-level Italian film production“.
