Regione Veneto
13.03 -10.04.25 - Film screenings of the European Parliament's Lux Prize 2025
There are five finalist films for the 2025 edition, there are four screenings and they are introduced by CINIT Cineforum Italiano experts. The cycle of screenings is closed by the winning film 2024.
You can rate the films from 1 to 5 by accessing the European Parliament website in the section dedicated to each film by 24 April 2025. The award ceremony takes place in Brussels in the plenary of the European Parliament on 29 April 2025.
Timetable: 5 p.m. presentation, screening and debate
Venue: Cinema Dante - Via Sernaglia 12, Mestre (VE)
Screenings in original language with Italian subtitles.
Free entrance subject to availability.
Under the hot Greek sun, the animateurs at an all-inclusive island resort prepare for the busy touristic season. Kalia is the leader of the pack. Paper decors, glossy costumes and dance shows fill the stage. As summer intensifies and the work pressure builds up, their nights become violent and Kalia's struggle is revealed in the darkness. But when the spotlights turn on again, the show must go on.
November 2021. 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artefacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what attitude to adopt to these ancestors’ homecoming in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? The debate rages among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi.
he world seems to be coming to an end, teeming with the vestiges of a human presence. Cat is a solitary animal, but as its home is devastated by a great flood, he finds refuge on a boat populated by various species, and will have to team up with them despite their differences. In the lonesome boat sailing through mystical overflowed landscapes, they navigate the challenges and dangers of adapting to this new world.
What drives the people who come to your country to wage war? Intercepted is an attempt to find an answer by showing two parallel worlds. The camera registers images of destruction in unhurried shots, in which we see Ukrainian villages, towns, houses and motorways after their liberation from the Russian occupation. We look closely – not into the abyss of destruction and death, but rather at landscapes being filled again with life. This gives hope and serves to balance out the media’s normalization of horror. They are frames set against the flood of images. Throughout the film, the soundtrack forms a shocking counterpoint. We listen to the recordings of telephone conversations intercepted in 2022 by the Ukrainian Secret Service between Russian soldiers in trenches in Ukraine and their families. It’s hard to decide which element is more devastating: the soldiers’ confessions of the rape, looting and brutal torture of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war or the (mainly) female voices from “back home” that bear witness to chauvinism and hatred, disinformation and schizophrenic propaganda. Sound and image stare each other in the face, stunned, brought together in a cinematic space.
LUX PRIZE
The LUX Prize is a film prize awarded annually to a European-produced film by the European Parliament. It was established in 2007, fifty years after the Treaty of Rome.
The LUX Prize reflects the European Parliament's desire to support cultural and linguistic diversity, in the belief that such diversity can serve as a bridge between Europeans. The LUX Prize aspires to be an instrument to discuss Europe, its values, its contradictions and its future.
The aims of the Prize are to shed a different light on the public debate on European integration and to facilitate the circulation of European films by overcoming the language barrier that hinders the existence of a common European film market. They raise awareness of some of today's major social and political issues, such as mental health, poverty, freedom of expression, gender equality, LGBTIQ rights, to name but a few. With this in mind, the €87,000 awarded to the winning film is intended to subtitle it in all 24 official languages of the European Union and produce one film copy for each Member State.
The logo, on which the actual trophy is modelled, is a spiral of film inspired by the Tower of Babel, understood in a positive sense as a symbol of the richness of diversity, linguistic and cultural plurality of the European Union.
PAST WINNERS OF THE LUX PRIZE
(2012) Io sono Li di Andrea Segre
(2011) Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro di Robert Guédiguian
(2010) Die Fremde di Feo Aladag
(2009) Welcome di Philippe Lioret
(2008) Le silence de Lorna diJ ean-Pierre e Luc Dardenne
For informations:
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