Pardo for Best Actress: Andra Guți

It’s always amazing discovering a new talent, especially a female one, because of the natural strength that only young women can infuse in a character in their first experience. There are so many outstanding examples, such as Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, Anna Paquin in The Piano and now we have a new cornerstone thanks to the young and powerful Andra Guți. Her angry and savage Alice T. who gives the title to Radu Muntean’s movie is a young woman impossible to ignore and very hard to forget and all because of her truthful and powerful performance. She is another beautiful discovery from Romanian cinema, an industry that in the last ten year has been discovered by festivals, reaching this way a much larger audience with its stories about social issues. Alice T. is more a genre movie, a painful coming of age that also involves a strong parental figure (Mihaela Sîrbu as her mother also gives a beautiful performance) and that will surely be remembered for the rise of a brand new talent of European cinema who wins an award at the Locarno Festival for her very first acting experience. Andra Guți will become one of those actors to meet several times across the festival circuit. But mostly in Locarno we hope.