Another Round swept the EFA awards with four wins for Best Film, Best Director, Best Script and Best Actor.
The Danish Oscar contender produced by Zentropa was a strong favourite at the annual European Film Awards ceremony, which was held online and hosted on stage in Berlin last night by leaving EFA Director Marion Döring, EFA Chairman Mike Downey, new EFA President Agnieszka Holland and leaving EFA President Wim Wenders.
The film was co-written by Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm, who had won an EFA award for Best European Screenplay in 2012 for The Hunt.
Mads Mikkelsen had shared the Best acting award with fellow actors Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe in San Sebastian, but was sole nominee and Best Actor winner at the EFA awards.
In their online accepting speeches to the European Film Academy, both Thomas Vinterberg and his long-time friend/collaborator Mads Mikkelsen paid tribute to the director’s daughter Ida Vinterberg who passed away in 2019 in a car accident, aged 19. She had appeared earlier in his film The Commune.
Vinterberg said: “My daughter died while I was making this movie. She loved this project and was supposed to act in it…The film was partly shot in her school… The only thing that made sense [when she died] was to carry on and make this movie for her. Your awards will honour her memory. I thank you from my heart.”
Mikkelsen added: “A shiny light is not here anymore, but she is there in every single frame so we dedicate this award to Ida Vinterberg. “
Vinterberg also thanked his producers Kasper Dissing and Sisse Graum Jørgensen, his ‘brother in arms’ Lindholm, cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen who “found the emotional way through this movie in an incredible way”, as well as co-editors Janus Elleskov Jansen and Anne Østerud “who realised that this strange film was an untameable beast, not supposed to be tamed, but let loose.”
Another Round has been a smash hit in Denmark, selling more than 800,000 tickets since September, making it the best-selling film of 2020.
Internationally, the film has sold worldwide and opened in limited cinemas in the US December 4 via Samuel Goldwyn Films before a digital roll out December 18.
Originally due to unfold in Reykjavik this year, the European Film Awards will be hosted instead in the Icelandic capital in 2022.
