Directors Andrea Arnold and Harry Comel receive awards at Film Fest Gent 2021

Directors Andrea Arnold and Harry Commel will receive the Joseph Plato Honorary 2021 on Wednesday 20 October in Ghent.

Arnold received the award after screening her intimate documentary a cow. Kümel received the award before the performance of the Condor Gruppe, which plays a new live score of Kümel’s cult classic dark girls. Film Fest Gent honors their outstanding contribution to the seventh art with this award.

Andrea Arnold

“Thanks to Andrea Arnold’s films, we get to know our fellow human beings better,” says program director Wim de Witt. “Arnold harnesses the full power of cinema: making the invisible visible.”

Although Arnold initially set her sights on an acting career, in the 1990s she switched up her role on the popular children’s TV show. No. 73 Film training in Los Angeles.

She made her first short film in 1998 Milk employment dog. Her third short film wasp, starring Natalie Press and Danny Dyer, instantly won an Academy Award in 2003.

Her first feature film did not go unnoticed. psychological arousal red road, which largely follows the principles of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95, was well received at the Cannes Film Festival, and won the Jury Prize. her second movie Fishbowl (2009), with young Michael Fassbender on the verge of breaking through, won the Jury Prize again in Cannes.

Arnold’s adaptation Wuthering Heights (2011) ignores all clichés in fashion drama and leaves only the essential components of Brontë: desire, revenge, and the inhospitable gray Yorkshire Moors.

Then Arnold went to the United States, where she and a group of non-professional actors, with the help of Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough, American honey (2016) made. This road movie won the 3rd Jury Prize.

Andrea Arnold often depicts young people on the fringes of society struggling to escape the stifling working-class environment. However, her poetic pictorial work distinguishes her from the often grim social realist films of an earlier generation of her countrymen, such as Ken Loach and Alan Clarke.

Arnold’s penchant for unprofessional and magnetic actors and her socially savvy view of the places she picks up in film give her work a distinctive originality.

With her latest documentary a cowIt is looking again for the outsider that our capitalist society devours, this time literally.

“Our relationship with the millions of non-human souls we use is an important part of our existence,” Arnold says. “I have a cow To invite people to think about it.”

As one of the most respected British directors of her generation, Arnold is also an inspiration to the next generation.

Harry Kommel

“It’s hard to beat Harry Kommel as a fashion designer,” says de Witt. “He is adept at investigating and perfectly drawing the boundaries between appearance and reality.”

Kümel debuted in 1968 with Mr. Howard, where an Austrian woman ends up on the run in Belgium and assumes the identity of Mr. Howarden, following Philip de Pelsen’s novel.

Then Kümel made a sexy vampire movie dark girls French film star Delphine Syrig stars as Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory. The film was a huge success all over the world.

The restored version, which was released last year in several cinemas in Belgium and France, once again attracted a lot of people – even fifty years after the original release.

In 1971, Kumail did not arrest anyone other than Orson Welles for his film adaptation MalpertuisThe horror story of the Belgian writer Jan Ray. With its lavish decor, it became ambitious Malpertuis It was selected in 1972 for the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival, among others: Pictures by Robert Altman and Solaris Van Andrei Tarkovsky.

Comil TV series Arrival of Joachim Stiller, a time capsule for Antwerp in the 1970s and based on the magical realist novel by Antwerp author Hubert Lambeau, confirmed its success, this time on the small screen.

abandoned herIt is Kümel’s latest film, and appeared in 1991, one hundred and 100 years after the publication of Louis Couperus’ novel. From the start of his career as a director, Kümel has been a much loved and sought-after film teacher.

Depending on who’s talking, Kümel is described as a living agitator or legend, and everything in between. But what is clear is that he is above all a visionary filmmaker who has never satisfied with the limits imposed on Flemish film.

He put Belgium-type film on the international map and thus made a significant contribution to the history of Belgian film. His boldness, both in subject matter and style, paved the way for the many Flemish directors working today, and aspiring filmmakers are still rediscovering them.

The annual Joseph Plateau Honorary Awards honor guests for their outstanding contribution to the art of filmmaking. The prize itself is a replica of Professor Joseph Plateau’s Phenakistiscope, a device with which he can “start” a series of successive drawings.