‘The Whistleblower’ Wins Top Prize at  2011 Palm Springs Film Festival

(The Hollywood Reporter) Larysa Kondracki’s The Whistleblower, which stars Rachel Weisz as a U.N. peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia, has won the Mercedes-Benz Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 22nd annual Palm Springs International Film Festival, held January 6-17, 2011. The awards were announced at a luncheon ceremony at Spencer’s Restaurant on January 16. The runner-up narrative films included Aftershock, Goethe, The Hedgehog, Paper Birds and Simple Simon.

Louder Than a Bomb, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel’s film about a poetry slam festival in Chicago, received the audience award for best documentary feature.

A jury of international critics reviewed the foreign-language submissions and gave the FIPRESCI Award for best foreign language film of the year to France’s Of Gods and Men, directed by Xavier Beauvois.

The Festival screened 205 films from 69 countries, including 41 of the 65 foreign language entries for this year’s Academy Awards.

As reported by Pat Saperstein in Variety, the festival saw record attendance, as well as more filmmakers and industry guests, leading to a “marked jump in film sales activities,” according to fest director Darryl Macdonald. Director of programming Helen du Toit said the festival continues to add notable events, such as a pre-festival retreat for filmmakers at the Annenberg Sunnylands estate and noted the popularity of the sold-out Talking Pictures events for Colin Firth, Javier Bardem and Michael Douglas.

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Ukrainian Canadian filmmaker Larysa Kondracki