| 2006 - Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck for The Lives Of Others |
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Lord Attenborough presented the award to Florian Henckel von Donnersmark at a special award screening at the BFI Southbank. 
The Lives of Others - Das Leben der Anderen - This remarkably assured first feature from writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck paints an altogether darker picture of life under the Communist regime in East Germany than the almost cosy existence nostalgically evoked in Good Bye Lenin! Set for the most part in East Berlin during the mid-8os, the film chronicles the consequences of the Minister of Culture's decision to investigate, by means of surveillance, the lives of a successful playwright and his actress wife (whose sexual favours the politician-clearly lusts after); those profoundly affected by the bugging of the couple's apartment are not only the artists and their friends but also the surveillance expert put in charge of spying on them, who finally comes to question the ethics of his work for Stasi, the state police. The complex but lucid script, with its wholly credible twists, and Hagen Bogdanski's sombre, noir-inflected camerawork together serve not only to establish a brooding atmosphere of fear, doubt and suspicion but to create a suspenseful thriller of properly political and moral relevance. The performances are uniformly superb, ensuring the film succeeds both as unusually convincing historical recreation and as an utterly compelling tale of individuals whose lives are shaped -tragically - by the society they live in.
Geoff Andrew - Notes from the London Festival programme
GERMANY 2005
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Screenplay:
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"An ambitious, confident, intelligent and extremely
well-acted, début feature which deals honestly and openly with a painful
period in recent German history. We also give a very honourable mention to an Italian
film by Kim Rossi Stuart,
ALONG THE RIDGE (Anche libero va bene), which would have been a worthy
winner had we not chosen THE LIVES OF OTHERS." said Jury President
Clyde Jeavons.
