“The main award goes to "Murina", a coming-of-age story told with graceful vigour and with an incredible mise-en-scene of details,” explained the decision to award the Grand Prix of the festival the president of the CinEast main competition jury, Romanian film director Radu Jude. 

Apart from Jude, the international jury included Czech director Michaela Pavlátová, Luxembourgish producer and director Nicolas Steil, Luxembourgish actress and director Larisa Faber and Belgian co-director of the Brussels IFF Céline Masset.

Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s feature debut Murina recently won awards at the Festival of Slovenian Film Portorož, for Best Sound (Julij Zornik) and for Best Film selected by the Slovenian Art Cinema Association.

Murina recently also garnered success at the Hamptons International Film Festival in the United States, winning the award for Best Narrative Feature, whereas in July, the film was victorious at Cannes, taking home the award for best debut achievement of the festival (Camera d’Or). The film has to date screened at about twenty film festivals around the world, and is about to appear at LIFFE festival in Slovenia, Tokyo International Film Festival, Seville Film Festival, Golden Horse festival, Leiden IFF and Free Zone in Belgrade.

Alamat Kusijanović co-wrote the script together with Frank Graziano, while the film’s producers are Danijel Pek (Antitalent) and Rodrigo Teixeira (RT Features), with co-producers Zdenka Gold (Spiritus Movens), Jožko Rutar (SPOK Films) and Miha Černec (Staragara).

In addition to Murina, the award-winning documentary, Love Around the World, directed by Anđela and Davor Rostuhar also reaped success at CinEast, as the Luxembourg audience voted it the best film of the festival. The film likewise won the Audience Award at the recently concluded DOKUart in Bjelovar, as well as this year’s ZagrebDox, winning another audience special mention at Croatian Film Days. The film is produced by the Club for Expedition and Culture KEK (Anđela and Davor Rostuhar), Drugi Plan (Nebojša Taraba, Miodrag Sila) and German production house Autentica (Patrick Hörl, Andreas Martin).

This year’s 14th CinEast took place 7th – 24th October in hybrid format – at cinemas across Luxembourg and online. The festival audience had the opportunity to see 55 feature and 35 short titles from Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to award-winning films Murina and Love Around the World, the festival screened two other Croatian feature films (minority co-productions Heavens Above and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn), as well as three short films (Penalty Shot, Microcassette – The Smallest Cassette I've Ever Seen and All Those Sensations in My Belly).

Cover photographs: 14th CinEast Awards Ceremony