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Popular Picks at This Year's Sydney Film Festival
The Cove wins the Audience Award for Best Doco at the Sydney Film Festival.
Louie Psihoyos' stirring documentary The Cove has won the Showtime Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival. The Cove follows a group of activists determined to expose the horrors behind the capturing of dolphins in the world's biggest supplier of dolphins, the town of Taijii in Japan. The Cove will open in cinemas on general release from August 20.
Festival jury member and director Oliver Hirschbiegel's study of the cyclical nature of violence in Belfast with Five Minutes of Heaven won the audience award for Best Fiction at the State Theatre, marking a great return for Hirschbiegel (Downfall) after the disaster that was The Invasion. James Nesbitt who stars in Five Minutes of Heaven, featured as one of this year's festival guests. The film will be released in cinemas in the second half of the year.
Australian film Cedar Boys, directed by Serhat Caradee, won the Best Fiction Film at the Festival's Satellite Venues. This film portrays the multicultural side of Sydney, following three Lebanese-Australian friends and their relationships with each other and the city that they live in, and a crime that comes back to bite them. Cedar Boys is in cinemas from July 30.
The Audience Awards have been an important feature of the festival for many years, and this year saw a rise of voting participation of 16% on last year. Each winning film will receive a Dinosaur Designs trophy in recognition of the film's popularity.
Australian films ranked well, with three films featuring in the top five at the State Theatre including Beautiful Kate and Accidents Happen. Other films that were well received by audiences were the retrospectives and the restorations including Wake in Fright, Liza with a Z and The Big Parade.
The top five films as voted by the audience for both the State Theatre and Satellite venues in documentary and feature film format can be seen here: http://www.sydneyfilmfestival.org/awards/audienceawards.aspx