Grand Prix
Best Film of the Year 2004

As usual, the opening gala of the 52nd Donostia-San Sebastian International Film Festival on September 17 served as the stage for presentation of the FIPRESCI Grand Prix for Best Film of the Year.

Notre musique

The international recognition awarded within the framework of the San Sebastian Film Festival by FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) and its FIPRESCI Grand Prix - Best Film of the Year, is the best assurance of the importance of this award, now in its sixth year. 160 Federation members worldwide have issued their vote for a film from among those released between August 2003 and July 2004.

This award, created with a view to backing the most audacious, original and personal cinema, goes on this sixth occasion to a director of lengthy career and prestige: Jean-Luc Godard for his latest movie, Notre musique, presented in this year's Official Selection at Cannes.

Derek Malcolm and Ruth Waldburger (San Sebastian, September 17, 2004)

The new work by the always restless and experimental Swiss director is not a documentary, but neither is it a fiction. It's an essay with history. Divided into three parts: Hell, taking us closer to combat with a mixture of war shots; Purgatory, focussing on a visit to Sarajevo for the European Book Conference; and Heaven, portraying a bucolic scene custodied by US marines, the film shows that the wars of the past, the Balkans, and of the present, Palestine and Israel, are always terrible.

The FIPRESCI Grand Prix has been awarded at the opening gala of the 52nd San Sebastian Festival to Ruth Waldburger, producer of Jean-Luc Godard since 1996 with "For Ever Mozart" and to whom we owe titles including Alain Resnais' "On connaît la chanson" (1997), "Pola X" by Leos Carax (1999), or Nicole Garcia's "L'Adversaire" (2002), among many others.

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