Awards

Simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve in any art form, especially film. And though the winner of this year's Grand Prize may seem simple -- perhaps even almost naïve at first -- it is anything but. This deceptively sophisticated, bold, challenging and brilliant film forced us each to ask many questions -- human questions, philosophical questions, political questions, creative, artistic and cinematic questions -- and it has not ceased to resonate since we saw it. For all of us, it gave not only the sense of having watched a great film, but the actual feeling of having lived within the reality it reflects. This film does not only show a place and its people, but rather the film itself becomes a place. It transcends film and allows us to actually enter into the reality it describes in a manner that very few cinematic works -- if any -- ever accomplish. The ultimate goal of any art form is to awaken the viewer or its audience in some way. The most miraculous thing about this film is the way in which it avoids prescribing and articulating sentiments and messages for the viewer but awakens an individual awareness within each viewer. This is the highest goal of any artwork and the highest accomplishment.

Three Sisters guides us to Yunnan in a province in China. We follow three sisters living under conditions of immense poverty. The mother disappeared and the father is obliged to work in town far away. The film shows with majesty and respect the reverse of the globalization, the consumption and its consequences on the ones left behind, the most fragile members of the society, the children. The cinematic perspective discovers a world that confronts the precarious situation in the everyday life of the three sisters with their love, tenderness and a deep sense of responsibility between them.

Due to the sensitivity of his way of working the director has managed to let us dive into a reality that otherwise is invisible. The film leaves us with an almost physical experience to witness the conditions and challenges of three young sisters. We award the work of Wang, which whose images give those men and women a voice, who are often forgotten and ignored. We dare say that they are even despised because of the progress of our civilization.

For the accuracy and sensitivity with which the director offers us a penetrating and unsettling portrait of daily life in a community of highland farmers in mid China.