The awards were handed out at a ceremony at the grand Fort Manoel in the Maltese capital of Valletta.
Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz’s drama Life won the top Golden Bee award for Best Feature Film at Malta’s second Mediterrane Film Festival.
This year’s selection, curated by Italian film festival veteran Teresa Cavina, featured 45 films with connections to the Mediterranean basin, with 15 in the main competition.
The Mediterrane Film Festival concluded its second edition with the Golden Bee Awards ceremony at the historic Fort Manoel in Gżira. The event was hosted by British actor David Walliams. The main competition jury, which included Jon S. Baird, Margery Simkin, Mario Philip Azzopardi, Nathan Crowley, Pedro Luque, Richie Mehta and Tim Miller, evaluated 15 films and awarded prizes in six categories: Best Feature Film, Acting Performance, Screenwriting, Production Design, Creative Technical Performance and the Special Jury Award.
Life premiered at the Filmekimi festival in Istanbul last October and was also shown in Rotterdam earlier this year. The drama follows a young woman who escapes a forced engagement, prompting her jilted fiancé to search for her to understand the future wife he barely knew.
Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown, which premiered in Un Certain Regard, received the Jury’s Choice prize. Brandt Andersen’s The Stranger’s Case (Jordan) earned Golden Bees for Best Director for Andersen and Best Acting for Yasmine Al-Massri.