Senegalese-French Love Story 'Banel & Adama' Just Won MIFF's 2023 Bright Horizons Award

When you're Australia's oldest film festival and you screen hundreds of movies each and every year, how else do you keep standing out after notching up seven decades of cinema celebrations? If you're the Melbourne International Film Festival, you start your own major accolade. That was MIFF's approach in 2022, when it announced the new $140,000 Bright Horizons Award. Adding the gong to its lineup annually, the Victorian capital's major film fest has just revealed its 2023 winner: Senegalese-French love story Banel & Adama.

When you're such a long-running event and you show so many flicks year in and year out, how do you highlight newcomers worth knowing about? That's the Bright Horizons Awards' remit. In 2023, 11 titles were chosen to compete again as part of the festival's full lineup, but only one could emerge victorious. That winner hit Melbourne fresh from playing in-competition at Cannes, and marks the feature debut of Franco-Senegalese writer/director Ramata-Toulaye Sy.

Banel & Adama follows it titular characters (Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo), who are happily in love in a rural village in Senegal's north. But when Adama shies away from being the future chief, their romance — which has already been complicated by Banel being married off to Adama's older brother Yero first — sparks repercussions.

Sy cast her star-cross'd lovers-focused film not only with first-time actors, but with non-professionals hailing from the region she uses as her setting. She also shot her movie entirely in the Pulaar language, a variant of Fulah from the area.

To take out the 2023 Bright Horizons Award, Banel & Adama competed against features such Australian efforts Shayda (MIFF's opening-night film) and The Rooster (starring Hugo Weaving, Love Me); 2023 Cannes Un Certain Regard winner How to Have Sex, about three British teen girls on a boozy getaway; Earth Mama, an A24 release by Grammy-nominated music video veteran Savanah Leaf; and Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which follows a musical journey across the Vietnamese countryside. Also, Disco Boy stars German talent Franz Rogowski (Great Freedom) and Animalia explores an alien invasion in Morocco.

Fellow contender Tótem, which spends a single day with a seven-year-old, earned a Special Jury Mention for Mexican actor-turned-director Lila Avilés (The Chambermaid).

Picking Banel & Adama as the winner, and showing Tótem some love: co-jury presidents Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, who directed 2022's Bright Horizons-winner Neptune Frost; documentarian Alexandre O Philippe (Lynch/Oz, Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist); former Cannes Camera d'Or-recipient Anthony Chen (Wet Season); and Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini (Yuni).

Announcing their selections, the jury said that Banel & Adama "is a film that speaks directly to the times with a cinematic language and landscape that challenges and confronts while drawing you into its immense beauty. A mysterious and strong first film from a young filmmaker with bright horizons".

And about Tótem, it advised that "the rich subtleties and nuance of this circular story draws us in and makes us a part of its family".

The MIFF jury also gives out another of fest's prizes: the $70,000 Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award. Also first arriving in 2022, it recognises an outstanding Australian creative from one of the festival's movies, and can span span a large number of roles, including the winning flick's director, technical or creative lead, or other craft positions.

This year's recipients: Soda Jerk for their latest clip-based satire Hello Dankness, which the jury called "a clear-eyed, sharply satirical take on one of America's most troubling chapters, transformative use of existing footage, and groundbreaking manipulation thereof".

The winner of 2023's brand-new First Nations Film Creative Award was also unveiled at the festival's closing night, with directors Adrian Russell Wills and Gillian Moody winning for autobiographical documentary Kindred.

And, scoring 2023's MIFF Audience Award: This Is Going to Be Big, about Sunbury and Macedon Ranges Specialist School in Bullengarook staging a John Farnham-themed musical.

The 2023 Melbourne International Film Festival runs until Sunday, August 20 in-person, and until Sunday, August 27 via MIFF Play, the fest's online platform.