71st Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica
4th INTERFILM Award for Promoting Interreligious Dialogue

The INTERFILM Jury at the International Film Festival Venice 2014 has chosen as winner of the 4th INTERFILM Award for Promoting Interreligious Dialogue the film

Loin des hommes
directed by David Oelhoffen, France, 2014

Motivation: With the film Loin des hommes (2014), based on an Albert Camus story, director David Oelhoffen tells a parable of human relationship overcoming hostility. Two men share a common faith in mutual dignity even though coming from different religious and cultural background and a unique friendship develops across cultural barriers. The director has managed to accomplish a film of clarity and ethical accuracy set in a striking Algerian landscape. The film displays the existential choice in every time to question corrupted cultural norms, prejudices and hatred. David Oelhoffens story provides a call to approve equality and life, acknowledging the other as your neighbour.

In addition, the jury wishes to highlight the Out of Competition entry Words With Gods which shows the complex diversity of religious beliefs in different cultures and social environments. The power and the strength, the ambivalence and the danger, the consolation and hope of religion are put in 9 different short stories directed by significant directors. This film is even more as a personal statement or a religious information about living faith, it is also a project for working on religious dialogue and tolerance.

“Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself”. (Albert Camus in his Nobel Prize Speech, Stockholm 1957).

Members of the Jury 2013 were:
Tomas Axelson, Sweden
Ralf Meister, Germany - Jury President
Anita Nipah, Italy