Shane Meadows
© AFP Vincenzo PintoROME (AFP) - "It's amusing that you have to change the rules of the game," Georgio Gosetti, told AFP in an interview Saturday. "In the end a large part of the jury fights for one title and the other fights for a second one."
The jury president, Italian filmmaker Ettore Scola, "tried to respect democracy," Gosetti said. "They had a very, very long discussion, and part of the jury agreed only with the assurance of recognition of Shane Meadows' film."
"This Is England" focuses on Thatcher-era skinheads through the eyes of an impressionable boy.
The mercurial Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), who lost his father in the Falklands War, is mercilessly teased at school and finds solace in the tough but tender camaraderie of a skinhead gang who let him join even though he is only about 12 years old.
Shaun learns to hate Pakistani immigrants through the gang, but finally rejects the life when Milky, a Jamaican immigrant, gets beaten to a pulp by his fellow gang member, Combo, politicized by the far right National Front.
On accepting the award, Meadows said: "I thank the jury because the subject matter of the film is not something easy to vote for. It's about racial hatred... I applaud them for being brave and voting for it."
He also revealed that in real life Turgoose had been "in and out of trouble with police," and that now, thanks partly to the award, "this kid's life has changed forever."
The picture that was named Best Film on Saturday, "Playing the Victim," is a dark comedy drawn from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in which the central character has the odd job of playing the victim in police reconstructions at crime scenes.
As the morbidity and absurdity of it all starts to get to him, he has a vision in which his late father reveals to him that he was poisoned by his own wife and her lover.
Rome's first film festival, a nine-day, 10 million euro (12.5 million dollar) event created by Mayor Walter Veltroni, had 16 films in competition, several world premieres and dozens more films shown out of competition.
"It is a great, great, great success to achieve in the first edition a real professional level and such a strong reaction from the audience," Gosetti said. "It's a great success because of the general quality of the movies, according to the press in any case, especially the foreign press."
He added: "If the international press finds this kind of opportunity interesting, you have the basis for future success.
"Our goal is to try to define and then impose a different way to promote films, and to celebrate directors, actors and actresses."
©AFP