The winners of the 2023 European Film Awards were announced live from Berlin, Germany on Saturday 9th December, with Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall receiving a number of major accolades, including Best European Film.

The European Film Academy announced 11 different films from as many as 10 different countries as winners across a wide range of categories, whilst also honouring a number of individuals for their contributions to the form. English actress Vanessa Redgrave was honoured with the European Lifetime Achievement award, with Spanish film director Isabel Coixet being rewarded for European Achievement in World Cinema.

Anatomy of a Fall was the most celebrated of the stacked line-up of films, winning the award for Best European Film over fellow nominees Fallen Leaves, Green Border, Me Captain and The Zone of Interest, as well as picking up awards for European Director, European Screenwriter, European Editing, and European Actress, the latter of which was won by Sandra Hüller who was nominated twice in the category for Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest.

The awards ceremony was streamed live and in full via the European Film Awards website, with replays still available.

The winners of the 2023 European Film Awards (EFAs) are as follows:

European Film – Anatomy of a Fall
Fallen Leaves
Green Border
Me Captain
The Zone of Interest

European Young Audience Award – Scrapper
Longing for the World
One in a Million

European Discovery – Prix Fipresci – How to Have Sex
20,000 Species of Bees
La Palisiada
Safe Place
The Quiet Migration
Vincent Must Die

European Documentary – Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
Apolonia, Apolonia
Four Daughters
Motherland
On the Adamant

European Animated Feature Film – Robot Dreams
A Greyhound of a Girl
Chicken for Linda!
The Amazing Maurice
White Plastic Sky

European Short Film – Hardly Working
27
Aqueronte
Daydreaming So Vividly About Our Spanish Holidays
Flores Del Otro Patio

European Director – Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall)
Aki Kaurismäki (Fallen Leaves)
Agnieszka Holland (Green Border)
Matteo Garrone (Me Captain)
Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest)

European Actress – Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall)
Eka Chavleishvili (Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry)
Alma Pöysti (Fallen Leaves)
Mia McKenna-Bruce (How to Have Sex)
Leonie Benesch (The Teachers’ Lounge)
Sandra Hüller (The Zone of Interest)

European Actor – Mads Mikkelsen (The Promised Land)
Thomas Schubert (Afire)
Jussi Vatanen (Fallen Leaves)
Josh O’Connor (La Chimera)
Christian Friedel (The Zone of Interest)

European Screenwriter – Justine Triet, Arthur Harari (Anatomy of a Fall)
Aki Kaurismäki (Fallen Leaves)
Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko, Maciej Pisuk Agnieszka Holland (Green Border)
Johannes Duncker, Ilker Çatak (The Teachers’ Lounge)
Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest)

European Cinematography – Rasmus Videbæk (The Promised Land)

European Editing – Laurent Sénéchal (Anatomy of a Fall)

European Production Design – Emita Frigato (La Chimera)

European Costume Design – Kicki Ilander (The Promised Land)

European Make-Up & Hair – Society of the Snow

European Original Score – Markus Binder (Club Zero)

European Sound – Johnnie Burn, Tarn Willers (The Zone of Interest)

European Visual Effects – Society of the Snow

European Lifetimes Achievement – Vanessa Redgrave

European Achievement in World Cinema – Isabel Coixet

Eurimages Co-Production Award – Uljana Kim

Honorary Award of the EFA President and Board – Béla Tarr

European Sustainability Award (Prix Film4Climate) – Güler Sabancı

Briony Tallis, thirteen years old, has just finished her first play.

Released in 2007 and directed by Joe Wright, Atonement is a film about stories: where they come from, why we tell them, and what happens when the line between reality and fantasy blurs. Adapted from Ian McEwan’s novel of the same, Atonement spans six decades, taking us from the English countryside to the evacuation of Dunkirk, to The Blitz, and back again. It is filmmaking on an epic scale, a true testament to the power of cinema. It remains just as affecting today, fifteen years after its release.

We begin in the summer of 1935. WWII is looming and it’s the hottest day of the year; a sense of uneasiness and restlessness permeates the air. Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) enlists the help of her annoying cousins to perform in her play which she intends to put on for her whole family later that evening. But after Briony misinterprets a moment between her older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightly), and Robbie (James MacAvoy), the housekeeper’s son, and her cousin Lola (Juno Temple) is attacked, Briony tells a lie that will alter the course of all their lives forever.

Adapting Atonement was surely a challenge given its nonlinear storytelling, but rather than simplifying the narrative director Joe Wright urged screenwriter Christopher Hampton to maintain the novel’s structure. Because of this, the film is separated into four distinct parts, each feeling like its own act, with Briony Tallis as the string that holds it all together. “I was kind of playing Briony as director,” Wright said during a behind-the-scenes featurette. “She’s written the film. She’s the eyes of the film.” Wright uses this perspective to call into question the very nature of storytelling itself, and he weaves this metanarrative seamlessly into the film’s visual language. Through Briony’s eyes, the summer of 1935 is hazy and overexposed – a perfect memory. The last good thing that ever happened. Her whole family is together and happy. New love is just beginning to bloom. We get the sense that this is not a factual retelling of events, but a reconstruction of them. Nothing is exactly as it happened – only how it’s remembered. Still, Atonement reminds us how we are often unreliable narrators, unable to see past our own recollections of events.

We relive key moments from several different perspectives, and these shifts in time are cut together so precisely and fluidly with clear visual clues for where we are in the timeline that it’s never confusing or frustrating. The score, composed by Dario Marianelli for which he won the Academy Award, shines during these sequences. The typewriter keys click in rhythm like a clock, turning back time.

While performances from Juno Temple and Benedict Cumberbatch are some of the film’s highlights, Atonement’s success and believability rests on the shoulders of the three actresses playing Briony at major turning points in her life. The hair and makeup departments went to great lengths to make Briony’s look consistent and recognizable throughout the film, and while it does seem silly that someone would keep the same exact hairstyle for decades, the result is striking. We believe they’re all Briony, with each performance representing different, complex, and often contradictory parts of her. Saoirse Ronan’s Briony is judgmental and bossy, too confident for her own good. She is both an innocent child and a willful liar, and Ronan manages to strike a perfect balance between the two. With Ramola Garai, Briony is a shell of her former self. She retreats inward, struggling to make sense of the mistakes she has made. Vanessa Redgrave is given the least amount of screen time as a much older Briony, but she makes the most of it. Her command of the camera is evident in her closing monologue, with nothing but herself and a black abyss to keep our attention.

One of the most stunning and talked about sequences in Atonement is the continuous, five-minute, Steadicam shot in which we follow Robbie (James McAvoy) and his two companions as they wander through the chaos and misery of the Evacuation of Dunkirk. With two days to rehearse, 1,000 extras to stage, and a million things that could go wrong, the resulting shot is a technical and artistic achievement, and its success owes a lot to the exhaustive work of Steadicam operator Peter Robertson. While the shot does indeed call attention to itself, that almost feels like the point. There’s no cutting, no opportunity to look away. Robbie cannot escape this nightmare and all we can do is watch. We’re forced to sit with the uncomfortable truths of war, all honor and glory stripped away.

The ending of Atonement is a gut punch. When Briony works up the nerve to face Cecilia and Robbie, finally taking responsibility for her lies all those years ago, he asks her to do one thing: write it all down. “No rhymes. No embellishments,” he says. But in the final moments of the film, when Briony speaks directly to us, we learn that she could not keep this promise. The story we just saw wasn’t the truth, it wasn’t what really happened. She made it up. It was a fantasy, an atonement for all the suffering she caused. The happily ever after we so longed for is snatched away from us, replaced by cold, hard reality. “But what sense of hope could a reader derive from an ending like that?” Briony wonders aloud. And indeed Briony’s confession is not the true ending of Atonement. The final images of the film are that of Robbie and Cecilia walking along the beach near their cottage, happy and alive. Briony gives them the chance to live and love, forever sealed within the pages of her novel. Her words will live on long after she has gone. Stories are, after all, an act of remembering.

Written by Margaret Roarty

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In Adrian Hoven’s super-exploitative 1973 horror film Hexen geschändet und zu Tode gequält (Mark of the Devil, Part II; the German title translates into English as ‘Witches Violated and Tortured to Death’), the spiteful witchfinder Natas (played memorably by the facially disfigured Austrian actor Reggie Nalder) confronts a nun, Clementine (Astrid Killian), who is accused of witchcraft. Having been thrown into the cells and raped by the gaoler, who froths at the mouth grotesquely during the act itself, at the time of her trial Clementine is discovered to be pregnant. ‘Was it the devil who committed this act of fornication?’, Natas spits during the trial, ‘The Devil appeared in your cell and you kissed his arse! Admit it!’

The absurdity of this far-too-vivid accusation, no doubt amplified by the film’s admittedly clumsy English dub, clearly sidesteps the most likely reason for Clementine’s pregnant state (ie, human cruelty) whilst validating for Natas the fact that as a heretic, she has been marked for execution in an unmeasurably cruel manner – by being burnt alive on an elaborate scaffold. The sheer illogicality of Natas’ statement, intended to underscore how twisted the psychopathology of the witchfinders is – in other words, their need to avoid the most logical explanation for events in order to provide a supernatural reason that justifies their sadistic pursuit of alleged witches and sorcerers – was a key paradigm of the horror pictures focusing on witch-hunting made during the late 1960s and 1970s. Elsewhere in the same film, a wedding is interrupted; the participants are accused by Natas and his cronies of drinking a love potion, and a man is arrested ‘for bringing in the Devil’s bastards with the magic aid of a witch’s brew’. In the original Mark of the Devil (Michael Armstrong, 1970; the German title of this is Hexen bis aufs Blut gequält, or ‘Witches Tortured Till they Bleed to Death’), the witchfinder Albino (also played by Nalder) arrests a puppeteer and his wife, accusing them of ‘practising magic using the intermediary of puppets with lifelike human voices’ and ‘consorting with the Devil to trap human souls in these dolls’. Elsewhere in the same film, a woman is accused of mixing a ground human foetus with frogspawn in order to cause a priest to limp.

Witchfinder General (1968)

The witch-hunting film, at least in the form by which it is recognisable today, essentially originated with Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General in 1968. Adapted from a well-researched but exploitative historical novel by Ronald Bassett, published in 1966 under the same title as its film version, Witchfinder General was directed by Michael Reeves. Reeves was a prodigious talent; Witchfinder General was Reeves’ third feature, following The She-Beast in 1966 and The Sorcerers in 1967, and there are numerous accounts of the on set conflict between Reeves and Witchfinder General’s chief star, Vincent Price, who plays Matthew Hopkins himself. (‘Take me to your goddamn young genius’, Price reputedly told producer Philip Waddilove when Waddilove collected Price from the airport.) Reeves had wanted Donald Pleasence for the part, but American International Pictures, who co-produced the film with Tigon British Film Productions, stipulated that Price be cast as Hopkins. By all accounts, Reeves showed little restraint in his apparent distaste for Price’s theatrical style of acting, though Price certainly brings a dandiness to the role that stands in stark contrast with the austerity of the Cromwellian ideology with which the film’s hero, Roundhead soldier Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), is associated.

Taking place during the English Civil War, Witchfinder General focuses on the activities of Matthew Hopkins, an East Anglian witch-hunter who proclaimed himself to be ‘witchfinder general’ and documented his activities in his 1647 book “A Discovery of Witches”. (The book was credited to ‘Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder for the Benefit of the Whole Kingdome’, and opened with a quote from Exodus 22:18, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’.) In this book, structured as a series of common queries about witch-hunting which Hopkins furnishes with answers, Hopkins outlined some of the methods for spotting witches: for example, pricking a mark upon the body of the suspect which is believed to be an extra teat used to nourish a ‘familiar’, who would drink the witch’s blood; if such an extra ‘Pap’ is pricked, it will not bleed and the witch will feel no pain. In the final part of the book, Hopkins tries (vainly) to respond to the common criticism of his practice, which was that ‘All the witch-finder doth is to fleece the country of their money and therefore rides and goes to townes to have imployment, and promiseth them faire promises, and it may be doth nothing for it, and possesseth many men that they have so many wizzards and so many witches in their towne, and so hartens them on to entertaine him’. Hopkins’ riposte to this was that he never went to any town that did not ask for his services, only claimed to identify witches ‘after her tryall by search, and their owne confessions’, and demanded ‘but 20.s a town, & doth sometimes ride 20. miles for that, & hath no more for all his charges thither and back again (& it may be stayes a weeke there) and finde there 3. or 4. witches, or if it be but one, cheap enough, and this is the great summe he takes to maintaine his Companie with 3. Horses’. Perhaps the witch-finder doth protest too much. Historical records seem to show that Hopkins was paid far more than the 20 shillings per town that he claimed to receive for his ‘services’. In Reeves’ Witchfinder General, Hopkins asserts that he is doing ‘the Lord’s work’; to this his associate John Stearne says, ‘And a profitable one, the good Lord paying in silver for every hanging’.

With his accomplice John Stearne, over a two year period Hopkins was responsible for around 100 executions of witches and sorcerers – approximately one-fifth of the entire number of executions for witchcraft that took place in Protestant England between the 15th and 18th Centuries. His activities focused on Parliamentarian counties that were heavily Puritan in their outlooks. The common interpretation is that Hopkins took advantage of the lawlessness and dissent engendered by the Civil War, in order to line his pockets. In Reeves’ film, the character of John Lowes (Rupert Davies), a priest persecuted by Hopkins for making an alleged covenant with the Devil, asserts pointedly that ‘The lack of order in the land encourages strange ideas’. This is certainly the thesis put forward by Bassett’s novel and Reeves’ film adaptation, an approach to, and interpretation of, witch-finding that dominates many of the subsequent films. The truth is perhaps more complex, however: Hopkins was the son of a Puritan clergyman, and during the Civil War was far younger than his depiction in Reeves’ film. (The real Hopkins is believed to have been somewhere between 25 and 28 years of age during his misadventures as England’s ‘witchfinder general’.) He apparently died of tuberculosis in 1647; though legend suggested he himself was ‘swum’ as a witch, there is no evidence of this.

In terms of his methods, Hopkins was influenced by the outcome of the Lancaster Witch Trials of 1612-34 which, investigated by Charles I’s physician William Harvey, set a benchmark that physical proof of making a covenant with the Devil was required for a successful prosecution. Hopkins also drew from some of the methods outlined in James I’s 1599 treatise “Daemonologie”, which suggested sleep deprivation (often through ‘walking’ – ie, keeping the alleged witch sorcerer active by making them walk around a room for days on end), pricking (as outlined above), and ‘swimming’ – which was based on the notion that witches, who had by making a covenant with the Devil renounced their baptism, would float when ‘swum’ in a body of water. (If they drowned, of course, they were innocent of witchcraft – but that didn’t bother a good capitalist like Hopkins.) Hopkins’ methods were employed overseas in the New England witch-hunts and the Salem witch trials of the mid/late 17th Century.

Reeves’ film places Hopkins at the dead centre of a fictional story involving Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), a trooper in Cromwell’s army, whose fiancee’s uncle, John Lowes, is executed for witchcraft by Hopkins and Stearne (Robert Russell). Like a number of other named victims of Hopkins in the film (such as Elizabeth Clarke, who is burned for witchcraft at Lavenham), the name of John Lowes is rooted in historical fact: in reality, Lowes was an 80 year old priest in Brandeston who was ‘walked’ by Hopkins for several days, ‘swum’ in the moat of Framlingham Castle and finally hanged for witchcraft. In Reeves’ film, the vicar Lowes is the uncle of pretty Sara (Hilary Dwyer), Marshall’s beloved. In the aftermath of John Lowes’ persecution, Sara is taken advantage of and raped by both Hopkins and Stearne, and Marshall vows his revenge, pursuing Hopkins and Stearne across the landscape of East England.

Reeves’ film highlights the opportunism of Hopkins whilst also underscoring the depths of violence to which Marshall must descend in order to dispatch the fiend. There is no doubt, within the film, that Hopkins is a cynical opportunist who takes advantage of the social dislocation caused by the Civil War – for his own financial gain. In the film’s opening sequence, a crowd assembles in a rural village to watch the hanging of a witch. A priest offers some partially-heard words as the woman screams in terror whilst being dragged to a hastily erected gallows. Her screams are cut short as the drop breaks her neck, and the crowd disperses – their cries of encouragement swiftly turning to a look of shame. It’s a scene bold enough to evoke sickness and shame in any number of those who watch it.

Reeves emphasises the seductive nature of violence – and the manner in which it is cyclical. Violence begets violence. To quell violence demands a greater display of violence. Ideologically speaking, for most people this is abhorrent… inhumane. But, sadly, it seems an interminable fact of life. In his approach to violence, there are many parallels between what Reeves essays in Witchfinder General and the work of Sam Peckinpah, whose most successful venture, The Wild Bunch, would be released in the US the following year (1969). In Witchfinder General, Reeves shows children in the crowd watching the burning of Elizabeth Clarke at Lavenham, and afterwards we see these children cooking potatoes in the embers. The staging is similar to the opening of The Wild Bunch, in which Peckinpah shows a group of children tormenting scorpions by forcing them into a makeshift arena with hundreds of red ants. Both filmmakers offer a quiet commentary on the notion that violence is both innate and learned. The connection with Sam Peckinpah would be consolidated by the work of John Coquillon, the director of photography on Witchfinder General and Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs (1972), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Cross of Iron (1977) and The Osterman Weekend (1983).

There were predecessors to Witchfinder General, of course: for example, Mario Bava’s Le maschera del demonio (Mask of Satan/Black Sunday, 1960) features a witch (Barbara Steele) who – in the film’s opening sequence, set in 1630 – is executed by having a nailed mask hammered into her face. Approximately two hundred years later, she is accidentally resurrected when the mask is removed from her corpse and blood is spilled on her mummified remains; this incident sparks her quest for supernatural revenge. However, what Witchfinder General did differently to its predecessors was to set its story predominantly by daylight, avoiding the Gothic trappings of most horror films, and also negating any sense of supernatural shenanigans. This is a story of human cruelty, pure and simple. The film is at its heart structured like a revenge Western, including many shots of its characters riding across the countryside on horseback. The similarities with the Westerns of American filmmakers like Budd Boetticher, for example, are underscored by Reeves’ emphasis on location shooting – taking the story out of the studio as much as possible. To this end, Reeves uses some incredibly evocative locations, including setting the climactic confrontation between Marshall and Hopkins in and around Orford Castle, near Ipswich. This, along with some of the richly observed dialogue (‘They’re burning witches there… or some such rigmaroll’), gives the film a strong sense of authenticity.

Witchfinder General establishes its historical credentials with an opening narration that sets the specific context for the film: ‘The year is 1645’, the narrator tells us, ‘England is in the grip of a bloody Civil War. The structure of law and order has collapsed’. Many of the subsequent witch-hunting films featured similar opening narrations or onscreen scrawls, as though adopting the familiar technique of Victorian pornography and horror fiction to present their lurid fictional(ised) narratives as ‘found’ material. The film is rough. Bloody rough. Unrelenting in its depiction of violence and exploitation, Witchfinder General is not graphic by modern standards (though John Trevelyan, chief examiner of the BBFC at the time of the film’s release, exerted his powers to trim many of the film’s more violent moments) but is nevertheless truly disturbing. The opening hanging, the treatment of Lowes, Stearne’s rape of Sara in a field in front of a gurning witness, the cheering of the crowd at the burning of Elizabeth Clarke in Lavenham… all of this adds up to a depiction of human cruelty which belies Reeves’ youth at the time of the film’s production: Reeves was 25 when he made the film, and only months after its release he would pass away, his death the consequence of an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescribed barbiturates.

5. Charlotte Rampling

Charlotte Rampling’s long career spans 50 years and it includes films of various genres. She is perhaps most well-known for her controversial roles, such as those in The Night Porter (1974) and Heading South (2005).

I must say I didn’t watch those particular films, so my appreciation of her acting ability is based on her roles in such films as The Damned (1969) – which was part of Luchino Visconti’s German trilogy – and The Duchess (2008) in which she played the Countess Spencer, mother of Keira Knightley’s character Georgiana Spencer. The Duchess was directed by Saul Dibb, the director of Suite Française (2015), and that is evident since it was a beautiful and enjoyable film, although the story was sad and upsetting. I also enjoyed her performance in the BBC miniseries Restless (2012) – it was a gripping series set in the 1970s. In Restless Charlotte Rampling plays the older Eva, a Russian spy at the time of WWII, and Michelle Dockery portrays her daughter.

4. Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith is another British icon. She most recently starred in the successful and acclaimed TV-Drama Downton Abbey as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, but she’s been an actress for a very long time. She is perhaps best known for starring in A room with a View (1985), and in the unforgettable Harry Potter saga as Minerva McGonagall. More recently she starred with Judi Dench in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2015). I personally appreciated her portrayal of Jean Horton, a soprano singer, in Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut Quartet (2012), a film which portrayed the life of the residents of a Retirement Home for Musicians, exploring the comedy in their elderly bickering and highlighting their performances in pursuit of their love for music. Maggie Smith has a unique charisma and, to me, is one of the best British actresses alive.

3. Helen Mirren

Helen Mirren is an old-school British actress who I had the pleasure to see for the first time in the most acclaimed film of 2006, The Queen, which earned her a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role – I personally found this film to be outstanding and I really think it deserved all its praise. Mirren was particularly brilliant in her portrayal, and I don’t think anyone could choose a better actress for the role. I also enjoyed watching the film Inkheart (2008) in which she had a secondary role as Elinor Loredan; she was hilarous and, as always, excellent. I’m also planning to watch her latest film A Woman in Gold (2015), about Maria Altman a Jewish refugee who reclaims a painting by Klimt, which was stolen by the Nazis at the time of WWII. I’m sure I won’t be disappointed by her performance.

2. Venessa Redgrave

She’s one of the most important actresses in the British cinema industry. She was born into the Redgrave family – a family of actors – and has a long and prolific career. In all of her roles she showed devotion, talent and sometimes courage depending on the roles she was asked to perform. Her importance in the British spotlight cannot be denied and I’m always happy to watch both the classics and her latest performances. Among her more recent roles are Atonement (2007), as the older Briany Tallis, and Letters to Juliet (2010), but the list goes on so I’m sure anyone can find a film well suited to their tastes.

1. Judi Dench

I chose to put Judi Dench at the top of my list of British Icons simply because she’s beautiful, talented and seemingly nice – although I may be biased since I have a personal preference for her. I appreciated her peformance in the TV- Series Return to Cranford (2007) not to mention her countless performances on the silver screen in films such as Tea with Mussolini (1999) and in Pride and Prejudice (2005) as the haughty and unpleasant Lady Katherine de Bourgh. I also enjoyed her role in the James Bond movies Casino Royal ( 2006) and Skyfall (2012) in particular, as Bond’s boss M. My favourite Dench role is that of Ursula in Ladies In Lavender (2004) alonside Maggie Smith and Daniel Brühl as I found her performance to be delicate and sweet. She is undoubtedly a passionate and dedicated actress and I admire her both for her career and her personality. She’s a true gem of British cinema.