Little Ashes” Wins Audience Prize at Italian International Festival of Film Melodrama (Italy)

Tragic biographies and unmet challenges:
Verona’s festival awards prizes to films with unhappy endings.

AUDIENCE PRIZE – THE SCHERMI D’AMORE ROSE

The Schermi d’Amore Rose goes to the film Little Ashes (Great Britain – Spain, 2009) directed by Paul Morrison.

This year it was once again the audience who awarded the prize at the 14th festival dedicated to romantic films and melodrama.

Winner of Schermi d’Amore in 1999 with Solomon and Gaenor, which had its world première in Verona, Paul Morrison’s was among the five foreign films nominated for Oscars the following year. Now the refined British director has once again been recognized for his talent with a biopic which takes him from Wales in the 1910s (the setting for Solomon and Gaenor) to the Spain of the 1920s, for a tragic love story. The tormented relationship between Federico García Lorca (1899-1936) and Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), which the painter – after the Andalusian dramatist’s execution by Franco’s supporters – kept secret until the final years of his life. The Surrealist genius – played by Robert Pattinson before starring in Twilight – is portrayed during his university years, torn between his attraction for the author of Sonnets of Dark Love and his desire for fame and fortune, which would take him to Paris with the director Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), the third legendary Spanish figure with whom he would create the famous short, Un chien andalou (1929).

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