The surprise winner of the top prize at the European Film Awards ceremony last Saturday was Fatih Akin's Head-On, about a marriage of convenience between two troubled Turks in Hamburg. Head-On won the Golden Bear for best film in competition at this year's Berlin Film Festival, but it was considered a long shot for the EFA's best European film award against formidable competition from Alejandro Amenabar's The Sea Inside, Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education and Mike Leigh's Vera Drake.
The Sea Inside took EFA prizes for best director and best actor (Javier Bardem), while Imelda Staunton was named best actress for Vera Drake.
Repeating their success at Cannes this year, Agnes Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri took the EFA screenplay award for Look at Me (Comme Une Image). Wong Kar-wai's 2046 was named best non-European film.
In the Jameson People's Choice Awards, voted by members of the public, Fatih Akin made it a double when he was voted as best director, with Daniel Bruehl named best actor for Love in Thoughts and Penelope Cruz best actress for Don't Move.
The FIPRESCI award, voted by a panel of international critics, went to the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, for The Weeping Meadow. Petulant as ever, Angelopoulos remarked, "I've won eight or nine of these. I'm getting used to it."
Irish drama opens MMA
Alan Gilsenan's Timbuktu has been selected for the inaugural film season at the extensively renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it will be screened on January 7th. Timbuktu stars Eva Birthistle as a Dubliner who, with the help of a transvestite friend (Karl Geary), goes in search of her brother who has gone missing in the Sahara.
The programme also features a wealth of archival material, including John Ford's 1926 silent film, The Shamrock Handicap, starring Janet Gaynor, in which an Irish landowner, whose stables are no longer profitable, faces poverty unless he sells part of his enterprise to a wealthy American.
Farrell scrubs up well
Colin Farrell is set to make an appearance in the American TV series Scrubs, in an episode scheduled for US broadcast on January 25th. Farrell, who is a friend of Scrubs star Zach Braff, will play a character named Billy Callahan, who is described as, of all things, an unruly Irishman.
Mary's final reel
Regular visitors to Dublin's Irish Film Institute will miss the ever-helpful Mary Sherlock when she retires as manager of the institute's comprehensive specialist bookshop at the end of the year.
Sherlock was recruited to set up and develop the bookshop when the Irish Film Centre opened in 1992, and she assembled a wide-ranging collection of books on Hollywood, European and world cinema, providing an invaluable resource for students and teachers of film. She has also hosted the launch of practically every key book on Irish cinema published in the last decade.
mdwyer@irish-times.ie
