Prize winner 2025

Béla Tarr, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

Motivation

In the year when the European Capital of Culture doubles for the first time, as in the unique cross-border conurbation of Nova Gorica and Gorizia, we have decided to double the Darko Bratina Award, closely linked to this dual culture, wedged between East and West. That is why we are awarding the prize to two filmmakers from two different worlds: one from the East, Béla Tarr, a magnificent Hungarian filmmaker who knew how to tell the story of the curse and resilience of a world that has collapsed, and the other – actually two, since they are a couple – from the West (although one of them comes from Armenia), Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi, who in the 1950s created a film like no other. They started from images found in the world that did not belong to them, but to all of us, and they wove the memory of the human world (for example, their films created from footage shot by Luca Comerio during the First World Wa). They have traveled the world with their films and shown that film is created along paths of freedom, dialogue, and poetry, and through the independence of unconventional, demanding, and dynamic choices.

Both award winners have paved the way for a different view of film with their creative work, which transcends the borders of countries and languages. Their visions have opened up the space for thinking about history, society and art and teach us that film is a place where cultures, memories and human destinies meet.

Biography

Béla Tarr

Béla Tarr, a director from Hungary, where almost all of his films are based, made his first feature film, The Family Nest (1979), at the age of twenty-four. He retired the handheld camera, and his youthful anger has calmed down over the years, but has become deeper. The epic Sátántangó (1994), a seven-hour and twenty-minute long film shot on the Hungarian plains and awarded the Silver Bear, brought him worldwide recognition. His films go beyond narrative and create a rhythm and dimension, reminiscent of Ford or Melville, even if without direct influences. Although they come close to Tarkovsky or Jancsó, his films follow their own path, imbued with a political and humanistic dimension – as in Prologue (2004) or Werckmeister Harmonies (2000). With The Turin Horse (2011), he consciously concluded his film career. He then devoted himself to art installations and teaching between Sarajevo and Prague. As one of the most elusive yet most celebrated creators of his generation, he remains a symbol of auteur cinema, even though he evades this label.

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

Yervant Gianikian, an architect of Armenian descent, and Angela Ricci Lucchi, an Italian painter, were a couple both in their work and in personal life. For more than four decades, they used film as a means of reflecting on images and their ambiguities. In the 1970s, they appeared at international festivals with their “fragrant films,” where they intertwined film and ambient art with smells and performative gestures. They soon devoted themselves to researching archives and, during their travels, discovered forgotten footage by pioneers such as Luca Comerio, as well as films from areas shaken by war and conflict – Yugoslavia, Armenia, Africa, India. They rescued and processed these fragile records with their own “analytical camera”, a device for manual projection, re-recording and color toning that was reminiscent of the beginnings of cinema. In this way, they created new narratives that reveal hidden layers of images and show how documentary as a genre also carries ambiguities and blind spots. Their work has opened up the dark sides of history: colonial violence, wars, migrations and exiles. They have always put the masses – defeated, anonymous, and ignored – at the forefront, who in their films become the voices of history and a symbol of the human condition in a universal, choral sense. Angela died in February 2018.