’House of Others’ awarded prizes at Croatian film fest

Filmmaker Rusudan Glurjidze’s award-winning feature House of Others was singled out for prizes at Croatia’s annual Pula Film Festival, the event promoted as world’s oldest national festival.

Glurjidze’s internationally acclaimed work earned the Best Acting Performance award for Salome Demuria in addition to being named Best Minority Co-Production at the event.

With prize-winners announced on Saturday, the awards for House of Others were collected by the film’s co-producer Dario Domitrovic and composer Dusan Maksimovski, in attendance at the event.

The occasion marked the conclusion of the 64th edition of the festival that ran in western Croatia’s seaside city from July 15-22.

The latest international award marks the success of Glurjidze’s work, selected as Georgia’s bid for 2017 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

A co-production between Georgia, Russia, Spain and Croatia, it narrates a story of survivors of the destructive war in Abkhazia in the early 1990s, unable to find peace in houses cleared of their expelled owners.

Actor Salome Demuria was distinguished for her part in the work. Photo: House of Others film Facebook page.

Among over a dozen prizes the 2016 feature was honoured with the East of the West Competition Section Award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last year.

Organisers of the prestigious Czech festival called House of Others "a supremely auteurist work whose visual qualities hold their ground with those of Tarkovsky and Zvyagintsev, confirming the unprecedented rise of Georgian cinema”.

In addition, Spanish cinematographer Gorka Gomez Andreu was nominated for the AC Spotlight Award by the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) for his work on the feature.