Top prize goes to Ukrainian film

A 50-centimeter long bar of gold worth 100,000 dollars, the main prize of the Arsenal International Film Festival, which takes place every two years in Riga, went to the young Ukrainian film director Maksym Vasianovych’s documentary Mum Died on Saturday in the Kitchen.

The Arsenal Film Festival is one of the oldest in the post-Soviet space, and aims to support independent, debut, and author’s films.

Another peculiarity of the Riga forum is that the winner in the Best Film Category is picked through a lottery. All the participants of the main competition (there were 13 of them this year) were awarded with the Magic Crystal Prize, on which “Best Film Director” was engraved. All the participants of this truly democratic festival are seen as winners; the winner of the main prize is the one who finds a golden button in his glass of wine. Maksym, or to be more precise his wife, who represented him, was the lucky one.

This is not the film’s first award. Last year Mum Died on Saturday in the Kitchen was recognized as the best Ukrainian film in Kyiv’s film festival Molodist, and in spring Vasianovych was awarded with the main prize in the creative competition of Docudays UA, the Seventh International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, whose slogan was: “For silence which is louder than the noise.”

The Day was the first Ukrainian publication to write about the debut film of the then little known director.