Swiss director wins directing prize at San Sebastián Film Festival
Published: Sunday, Sep 29th 2024, 16:50
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Bernese filmmaker Piet Baumgartner has won a directing prize at the film festival in San Sebastián in northern Spain. With the world premiere of his first feature film "Bagger Drama", he beat off competition from ten filmmakers from Argentina, China, France, Georgia, Spain, Thailand, Turkey and the USA.
Baumgartner received the Kutxabank New Directors Award for his film about an excavator company in a small Bernese village, as announced by the film distribution company Coopi. The category was open to filmmakers whose first and second productions celebrated their world premiere. The prize is endowed with 50,000 euros.
Baumgartner's autobiographical fictional home movie revolves around a family that finds it difficult to talk about feelings, love or intimacy. The film can be seen in Swiss cinemas from May 2025.
Baumgartner, who trained as a mechanical draughtsman, is a visual artist, freelance filmmaker and playwright. He has received several awards. His play "EWS - Switzerland's only political thriller" about former Federal Councillor Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, which he created with Julia Reichert in 2022, was named Swiss Theater of the Year.
His 2015 music video for Rio Wolta's "Through My Street" also featured excavators. In it, Baumgartner, who teaches at the F+F School of Art and Design in Zurich, made two excavators dance.
The Festival Internacional de Cine de San Sebastián is the most important film festival in Spain. Greats of the film business such as Alfred Hitchcock, Bette Davis and Lana Turner have been guests in the picturesque city on the Atlantic. The main prize, the "Golden Shell", is named after the shape of the bay on which the Basque metropolis is situated. This year, it went to Albert Serra's bullfighting documentary "Afternoons of Solitude".
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