Shanghai - The Chinese crime drama The Dead End became the biggest winner at the Shanghai International Film Festival, bagging Best Director and Best Actor Golden Goblet Awards on Sunday.
The movie is about three sworn brothers who raise a young girl together, and their connection to a brutal rape-murder case. Cao Baoping won Best Director for the film and his stars Deng Chao, Duan Yihong and Guo Tao tied for Best Actor. Cao also directed Deng, a star of the Chinese variety programme Running Man, in the 2008 crime film The Equation Of Love And Death.
The French-Belgian thriller The Night Watchman won the top Golden Goblet Award of Best Feature Film. Carte Blanche, the Polish drama about a history teacher losing his eyesight, won the Jury Grand Prix, in effect the runner-up. Cake, the American drama starring Jennifer Aniston as a grieving woman suffering from chronic pain, won Best Screenplay. Krista Kosonen won Best Actress for the Finnish-Lithuanian movie The Midwife.
Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev headed the jury this year for the Golden Goblet Awards. Other members of the jury included Chinese actress Hao Lei and Hong Kong producer Nansun Shi.
The festival opened and closed this year with two home-grown productions. I Am Somebody, a self-financed comedy directed by Derek Yee about the lives of the nameless extras working at the famous Hengdian World Studios near Shanghai, made its world premiere as the opening film.
The closing film was Ballet In The Flames Of War, a Chinese-Russian co-production set during World War II, directed by Dong Yachun and Nikita Mikhalkov.
Xinhua, New York Times
