Paolo Cortellesi’s “ There’s Still Tomorrow ,” a box office smash in its native Italy, was Sunday named winner of the Sydney Film Prize at the end of the Sydney Film Festival (June 5-16) A jury headed by Danis Tanovic called the film about an industrious woman in post WWII Rome “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous.” The prize is one of the richest awarded at any festival and is worth A$60,000 ($39,600). The announcement was made at the city’s State Theatre ahead of the Australian premiere screening of the Demi Moore-starring Cannes hit “The Substance.
” The A$20,000 ($13,200) Documentary Australia award went to local filmmaker James Bradley, for “Welcome to Babel,” which charts Chinese-Australian artist Jiawei Shen’s plans to create an epic work. The inaugural recipient of the largest cash prize for First Nations filmmaking, the A$35,000 ($23,100) First Nations Award went to New Zealand filmmaker Awanui Simich-Pene’s “First Horse,” a short film that follows a young M?ori girl in 1826, a time when Aotearoa was on the cusp of colonization. The 2024 recipient of the A$40,000 ($26,400) Sustainable Future Award was U.
S. filmmaker Alina Simone for her film “Black Snow,” a documentary about a Siberian eco-activist, who fights for her community in a remote Russian mining town. Five short film prizes were awarded for The Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films.
These included the A$7,000 ($4,620) Dendy Live Action Short Award for “Die Bully Die,�.