Winners of the 2021 GIFF
International Narrative Feature Competition

Best Feature

<Neighbours> Mano KHALIL

Best Director

<Natural Light> Dénes NAGY

Best Screenplay

<Botox> Kaveh MAZAHERI, Sepinood NAJIAN

Best Feature

This film is a social drama masterpiece that explores history and politics. With a narrative from our contemporary time, it manages to tell stories from all eras. Going back and forth between the present and 40 years of the tragic reality that Kurdish continue to suffer as colonized people, it reminds us in many ways of the famous movie Yol.

Best Director

This film makes you feel the characters’ actual lives instead of explaining their desires. Long silences. Deep darkness. An ever slow-moving pace. These are all beautiful cinematic experiences that we haven’t encountered in a long time. That experience stays with you long after you left the film theatre and asks the question on how films should talk about wars.

Best Screenplay

We all know that writing a screenplay is hard, painstaking work that requires great sensitivity. It becomes even more complex if you decide to multiply the atmospheres, tones, rhythms of a story. Because this film is not a comedy, nor a thriller, nor a social criticism, but all of this at the same time, we have chosen to give the award for Best Screenplay to Kaveh MAZAHERI and Sepinood NAJIAN for Botox directed by Kaveh MAZAHERI.