Neuchatel 2015: GREEN ROOM, THE INVITATION Win

Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival wrapped this past Saturday with an awards ceremony that saw Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room win a whopping three awards: the HR Giger Narcisse Award for Best Feature Film, the Denis-de-Rougemont Youth Award, and the RTS Audience Award. The International Competition Jury, headed by Zoë Bell, stated that the film is "a powerful and stylish thriller ... gritty without ever celebrating its violence; and contrasts youthful rebellious naïveté with the harshness of real life villains. It is an unstoppable and irresistibly dark coming-of-age survival, and a punk rock killer machine of a story."

I was lucky to serve on the International Critics Jury, and we awarded our prize to Karyn Kusama's The Invitation. For my jury, "The Invitation is a seering and intimate portrait of fractured relationships, of ongoing trauma that violently surfaces, of coersion and manipulation of the most deadly kind. Beautifully shot and performed with an intensity to match its thematic exploration, director Karyn Kusama has crafted an intense and harrowing psychological thriller."

Other awards included the Silver Méliès Award for Best European Feature Film, which went to Men and Chicken, a Germany/Denmark co-production directed by Anders Thomas Jensen; the Imagining the Future Award for Best Production Design to Crumbs by Miguel Llansò; and the Best Asian Film (awarded by the public) went to Hong Kong action film Full Strike directed by Derek Kwok and Henri Wong.

Short films were also awarded: The HR Giger Narcisses Award for Best Swiss Short Film, which is also the nominee for the Silver Méliès Award for Best European Short Film, was awarded to Es War Finster und Merkwürdig Still, by Mirella Brunold and Nina Calderone; and the Tauris Studio Innovation Award was given to Parasit by Diego Haueunstein, also from Switzerland.