IT
06/09/2019

The 2019 GdA Director’s Award
goes to La Llorona


At the sixteenth edition of Giornate degli Autori, the film La Llorona was crowned the winner of the GdA Director's Award, selected from the lineup of eleven films in competition.

The jury has released the following statement about their choice of the winner:
"The winner of the GDA Director's Award is La Llorona by Jayro Bustamante. We also wish to highlight the other films shortlisted: Dominik Moll's Only the Animals for its precision and profound fresco of loneliness and Jan Komasa's Corpus Christi for its singular and irreverent take on religion. Bustamante, one of Latin American cinema's most unique voices, weaves a portrait of Guatemala's tragic history and its open wounds inspired by the legendary folk-tale of the same name. The combination of poetics and politics forges a haunting and acute fable not only about the past but of the present. La Llorona is an intimate ghost story told through a vivid female figure. It expends on the themes of loss, denial and acceptance. As the song 'La Llorona' says: Dicen que no tengo duelo, Llorona, porque no me ven llorar. Hay muertos que no hacen ruido, Llorona !Y es mas grande su penar! May the weeps of sadness but also of strength be felt across the world."

The film by Jayro Bustamante was assigned the award by the jury headed by Karim Aïnouz and composed of the members of the 28 Times Cinema project: twenty-eight young cinephiles, each from a different country in the European Union.

The GdA Director's Award carries a cash prize of €20,000, to be split equally between the director and Film Factory Entertainment, the international sales agency for the film, with the aim of promoting the circulation of the film around the world.