Wayne Wang's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the
award for best film and its star, Henry O, took honors for best
actor Saturday at the San Sebastian International Film
Festival.
The 58-year-old Wang, who may be best known for his 1990s films
The Joy Luck Club and the critically acclaimed
Smoke, based the screenplay for Thousand Years on
Chinese writer's Yiyun Li's short stories about the lives of
Chinese in China and in the United States.
The award for best director went to British filmmaker Nick
Broomfield for The Battle for Haditha about the
investigation into the 2005 killings of 24 civilians in the Iraqi
city of Haditha by Marines?-- the biggest criminal case
against U.S. forces in Iraq.
John Sayles, a two-time Academy Award nominee for best writing,
shared the award for best screenplay with Spain's Gracia
Querejeta.
Sayles, whose film Honeydripper is about a juke joint
in 1950s Alabama, said he was delighted with the win, "especially
as some of the members of the jury spoke languages different to
English."
Querejeta's film, Siete Mesas (de Billar
Frances), also captured the prize for best actress?--
Blanca Portillo, who portrayed the widow of a pool hall owner.
Another war inspired film, Buddha Collapsed Out of
Shame, by 18-year-old Iranian director Hana Makhmalbaf, won
the festival's special prize, awarded by a jury presided over by
novelist-director Paul Auster.
Makhmalbaf's film focuses on a 6-year-old girl's daily struggle
to go to school and learn the alphabet in Bamiyan, the Afghan
village where hardline Taliban militants demolished centuries-old
Buddha statues in 2001.
Sixteen films vied for awards at the 10-day festival, which
opened with David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises and also
showed the Demi Moore film Flawless.
Richard Gere and Swedish actress Liv Ullmann were honored with
lifetime achievement awards.
(CRI.cn via AFP September 30, 2007)
