Bronson takes the money and the gun as credits roll

Bronson takes the money and the gun as credits roll

Garry Maddox
June 15, 2009

THE British prison drama Bronson beat three well-received Australian films to claim the $60,000 first prize at the Sydney Film Festival last night.

Directed by a Dane, Nicolas Winding Refn, the film is a bold look at the life of England's most notorious prisoner, who calls himself Charles Bronson after the movie action hero and has spent 30 of the past 34 years in solitary confinement.

The result is a replica of last year, when another British prison drama, Hunger, took out the festival's first competition for "courageous, audacious and cutting edge" films.

The president of the festival jury, director Rolf de Heer, said Bronson best demonstrated "the competition's criteria of emotional power and resonance, audacity, cutting edge, courage and going beyond the usual treatment of its subject matter".

The filmmaker behind Ten Canoes and The Tracker announced the award at the close of the 12-day festival at the State Theatre.

Also yesterday the Premier, Nathan Rees, said that Tuesday's state budget would include a $5 million boost for the Screen NSW production investment fund, intended to underwrite up to $70 million worth of film productions.

Bronson stars the little-known Tom Hardy, who relates episodes from the title character's violent life inside and outside prison as though he's an old-time vaudeville performer addressing a theatre audience.

With no obvious favourite for the Sydney Film Prize this year, three Australian dramas were considered strong contenders after impressing audiences: Steve Jacobs's Disgrace, about a university lecturer dealing with life in post-apartheid South Africa; Khoa Do's Missing Water, on the memories of a refugee who fled Vietnam in a small boat, and Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate, about a writer returning to his family's farm to see his dying father.

Missing Water won a consolation prize, the Community Relations Commission's award for films dealing with stories of migration and cross-cultural issues.

In the $10,000 documentary competition, the jury could not split two films.

The prize was shared between Contact, by Bentley Dean and Martin Butler, about the first contact between an Aboriginal woman and white Australians in 1964, and Safina Uberoi's A Good Man, which looks at a grazier whose wife is quadriplegic and who opened a brothel in northern NSW.

The festival's chief executive, Mark Sarfaty, acknowledged early ticketing problems in claiming a strong audience response to the event, including 85 sold-out sessions: "A shorter festival has clearly struck the right chord with the audience. I do acknowledge early issues with our new web-based ticketing system and apologise to any of our patrons who were inconvenienced."

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