Fred Schepisi’s Australian film The Eye of the Storm was awarded the special jury prize at the Rome International Film Festival this morning Australian time.
The film was awarded the prize alongside French film See How They Dance by Claude Miller, who shared the award with Schepisi.
The Eye of the Storm has already won the award for Best Australian Film at the Melbourne International Film Festival; has been nominated for three IF Awards (Best Film, Best Actor for Geoffrey Rush and Best Actress for Judy Davis); and has seen a significant take at the box office, making it one of the highest grossing Australian films of the year. Transmission expects to pass $1.6 million this weekend.
This follows a strong opening for the film when it made its way into the top 10 on just 18 screens in its opening weekend.
The Eye of the Storm is set in the exclusive Sydney suburbs around Centennial Park in the 1970s, where the two children of dying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter (Charlotte Rampling, Melancholia) return home. As expatriate son Basil (Geoffrey Rush, Green Lantern) and daughter Dorothy (Judy Davis, Marie Antoinette) await her impending death, she continues to exert a powerful influence over them both, and the nurses that attend her.
Director Fred Schepisi returns to Australia for the first time since 1988′s Evil Angels (aka A Cry in the Dark), adapting Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White’s tome of the same name.
The Eye of the Storm was released in Australia on 15 September 2011from Transmission/Paramount.
