Abdolreza Kahani’s Mortician has received the Sean Connery Prize for Function Filmmaking Excellence, the highest prize on the Edinburgh Movie Pageant.
The award comes with a £50,000 money prize and is determined by an viewers vote.
The movie follows a reclusive mortician who faces an uncommon request from a dissident singer in hiding. Mortician was amongst ten options offered in Competitors at EIFF.
Elsewhere, the winner of the Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for Brief Filmmaking Excellence Competitors was Joanna Vymeris’s Mom Goose. The brief movie competitors winner was additionally selected by an viewers vote and comes with a £15,000 money prize.
The brief’s synopsis reads: After the demise of her husband, Janet decides to distract herself by rearing a goose, which is to be the centrepiece of her Christmas dinner. Nonetheless, as she grows ever extra remoted from her daughter, Janet’s have to nurture the goose turns into an obsession: one which is able to price her dearly. A contemporary-day Grimm’s fairy story about grief, isolation, and a goose.
EIFF ended this night, and was Paul Ridd’s second version in cost. Talking concerning the version, he stated: “Because the 2025 Edinburgh Worldwide Movie Pageant attracts to an in depth, I’m as soon as once more moved and humbled by the exhausting work and astonishing effort that everybody has put into making this Pageant stimulating, entertaining, and enjoyable. I’m so grateful to all of the organisations, groups, and people who put their hearts and souls into this.
He added: “I’m massively impressed by all of the filmmakers in Competitors and past, in addition to all our particular visitors, who’ve labored so brilliantly with us to platform their work on the large display and have been so beneficiant with their time with audiences and with the trade, who we all know very nicely are hungry for one thing contemporary and thrilling. I can’t watch for 2026.”
