This year’s awards were announced in 12th April in Urania National Film Theare on the closing gala of the 21st Titanic International Film Festival. Bulgarian Maya Vitkova received the 8000-euros Breaking Waves Award for her film, Viktoria. As she was not present, she sent a sound message thanking the jury - Hungarian director János Szász, Santa Lingeviciute the artistis director of the Vilnius Film Festival and British producer Andy Starke - the main prize.

„We remunerated the courage and dedicatedness of the story telling. Viktoria’s strength is the subjective and grotesque representation of history. It reminded us to György Pálfi’s Taxidermia. It is a film that must be noticed and awarded.” – said Hungarian director János Szász, the head of the jury.

In the Bulgarian film Viktoria, dreaming of the West, Boryana is determined not to have a child in communist Bulgaria. Nonetheless, her daughter Viktoria enters the world in 1979, curiously missing a belly button, and is declared the country’s Baby of the Decade. Viktoria’s decade of notoriety comes crashing down with the rest of European communism.

Viktoria is both intimate and epic, unfolding a mother-daughter story while also working as a wry, philosophical fable with broad historical scope. A bright talent, filmmaker Maya Vitkova employs a storytelling style that is dramatically compelling, visually inventive, and full of playful figurative devices, metaphors, and ironies.

The comic drama of Benedikt Erlingsson Of Men and Horses - that was Iceland’s submission for the 2014 Academy Awards - received a special, director’s award. This unusual debut film concentrates on what connects man and animal: both suffer the slings and arrows of love and death alike.

Titanic operates as a competiton festival since 2005. This year there were nine films competing for the Breaking Waves Award. Apart from the two winners the Hungarian audience had the chance to watch Tom at the Farm, the fourth film of Canada’s most provocative and bravest director, Xavier Dolan, To Kill a Man, the movie of Alejandro Fernández Almendras from Chile and Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short term 12. Further four debut-films were present in competiton: Turkish director’s work, The Long Way Home, Swedish Anna Odell’s The Reunion, Les Apaches, the first film of French actor, Thierry de Peretti and Blind from Norway that was first screened at Berlinale this year.

The students’ jury found Heart of a Lion to be the best piece of The European stories section. Finnish director, Dome Karukoski’s movie is a story of redemption. It is about the leader of a racist skinhead group whose prejudice gets into conflict with his desire of love and to have a family.

In 2014 the favourite of Titanic’s audience with a voting average of 4.78 proved to be The Optimists from Norway. In this documentary Norvegian ladies of 66 and 98 have been playing volleyball together for 40 years and they have further plans.

Source: www.titanicfilmfest.hu