Haifaa Al Mansour’s film “The Perfect Candidate” will be screened on Wednesday, December 4, at 20.30 at Trianon Cinema, at the closing ceremony of this year’s 32nd Panorama of European Cinema.
The film was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 76th Venice International Film Festival and was also selected as the Saudi Arabian entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards.
On the Closing Ceremony, before the screening of the film, the awards of this year’s festival will be announced.
The Awards are:
FIPRESCI Award - Theodoros Angelopoulos
By The International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Jury
PEKK Award
By The Greek Film Critics Association Jury
Panorama Award
By this year’s Panorama Jury
ATHINORAMA Award
By the Magazine’s Audience – Readers Jury
Furthermore, this year’s honorary awards will be given to: Mimis Plessas, Ericos Andreou, Maria Kallimani, Vassilis Mazomenos, Christos Siopahas.
The trailer of the film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4WdvsZLDtg
About the film:
Maryam is an ambitious young doctor working in a small town clinic in Saudi Arabia. Despite her qualifications, she has to earn the respect of male colleagues and acceptance from her patients every day. After Maryam is prevented from traveling to Dubai in search of a better job, a bureaucratic mixup leads her to stumble on the application for her local city elections and she decides to run. With her musician father away on tour playing the first public concerts allowed in the Kingdom in decades, Maryam enlists her two younger sisters to begin fundraising and planning campaign events. While they face the restriction of women's traditional roles in the Kingdom at every turn, Maryam's audacious candidacy starts to build momentum and challenges her conservative community. A tight race emerges between Maryam and her male opponent, as Maryam and her family mobilise their determination and creativity to move their traditional society forward.
About the director:
Haifaa al-Mansour is one of the country's best-known and most controversial directors, and the first female Saudi filmmaker. With her father's encouragement, she studied comparative literature at The American University in Cairo. She later completed a master's degree in Film Studies from University of Sydney, Australia. Her feature debut, Wadjda, which she wrote as well as directed, made its world premiere at the 2012 Venice Film Festival; it is the first full-length feature to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. Wadjda was selected as the Saudi Arabian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards, which is the first time Saudi Arabia has submitted a film for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
Filmography:
2019: The Perfect Candidate
2017: Nappily Ever After
2016: Mary Shelley
2012: Wadjda
2005: Women Without Shadows (short)
