Special awards
The Premio Raimondo Rezzonico was established in 2002, in memory of the man who was the Festival's chairman for almost twenty years. This award, offered by the Municipality of Minusio, is attributed every year to an important independent producer, with the aim to highlight a key figure in film, and to salute their courage, their ability to take risk and support auteurs.
It is sufficient to scroll down the list of films produced over the years to understand how Komplizen Film is basically more than just a "production company". Obviously, the company name – "accomplices" – immediately evokes a noir-like, conspiratorial sensitivity. Like a Rivette plot hatched by cinema-lovers congregating around projects which try to think of cinema, to rewrite it and, above all, to repeat it among friends. Komplizen has worked in the shadows. Only the most attentive observers have not missed the element linking the works of very different filmmakers such as Radu Jude, Sonja Heiss, Miguel Gomes, Maren Ade, Nadav Lapid, Valeska Grisebach and many more – which is a company that was founded in 1999 by Janine Jackowski and Maren Ade while they were still attending HFF in Munich (Jonas Dornbach has joined them in 2010). The idea is simple but brilliant: a true political, strategic and commercially successful intuition. Producing daring "local" cinema for an "international" audience. Female and male authors with a recognizable hand. With whom to weave a lasting and profitable relationship, allowing them their own poetics within a protective, complicit ecosystem. And investing in them. It is sufficient to think of a film like aKasha (2018) by Hajooj Kuka. Scrolling down the titles produced by Komplizen, we realize that the most important cinema over the past decade has been supported by them. Western (2017), A Fantastic Woman (2017), Toni Erdmann (2016), Arabian Nights (2015), Scarred Hearts (2016) and so on. The challenge launched by Skylines (2019-), a Netflix series, would seem to be the natural harbor for a company that has made thinking against dominant patterns its corporate and entrepreneurial mission.
Giona A. Nazzaro
