Goya Awards 2023: ‘As bestas’ triumphs with nine awards, Joaquín Sabina wins for best original song and Carlos Saura is honored

country drama as beasts rose this Saturday with nine Goya Awards, the most important of Spanish cinema, becoming the great winner of a gala that paid tribute to the director Carlos Saura, died the day before.

Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, 2023 Goya Honor Award, dies; he had released his 51st film

The film directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen It won the awards for best film, best direction, best original screenplay, leading actor -the Frenchman Denis Ménochet- and supporting actor -Luis Zahera-, photography, music, costumes and sound.

“Being a good director, apart from looking at Carlos Saura all the time, is surrounding yourself with the best possible team. And I have done it, that is the only merit I have ”, Sorogoyen said when picking up the award for best filmmaker.

In the 37th edition of the Goyas, as beasts started with 17 nominations, followed by 1977 modelwith 16, and alcarrás and five little wolves with 11.

The surprise was that alcarráswinner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival, did not get any prizes, while 1977 model got five.

The award for best leading actress went to the Catalan Laia Costa, 37, for her role in five little wolveswhere she plays a woman who redefines her relationship with her mother in light of her newly released motherhood.

“Many people have approached us to tell us that after seeing” the movie “have felt the need to call their loved ones”explained Costa when collecting the award.

The best actor award went to a Denis Menochet who, after working with French directors such as François Ozon and Emmanuel Carrère, and foreigners like Quentin Tarantino (inglorious basterds) or Ridley Scott (Robin Hood), won the most important prize of his career in Seville.

“I’m going to have to move to Spain,” said the Frenchman when collecting the award.

Sabina and ‘Argentina, 1985’, rewarded

In as beaststhe 41-year-old director from Madrid tells the story of a couple of French environmentalists who go to live in a village in Galicia (northwest) with a life project that ends up colliding tragically with the locals, particularly with two brothers.

“What we liked was to imagine the motivations of these four characters, how can you hate someone from your neighbor so much, and that of the two foreigners, people who are not welcome but who say ‘I’m not going to leave here’”explained Sorogoyen in an interview with the AFP during the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The singer Joaquin Sabina was distinguished together with Leiva with the Goya for the best original song for Feeling it a lotwhich gives the title to a documentary about his figure.

The movie Argentina, 1985about the trial of the commanders of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), nominated for an Oscar in March, fulfilled the forecasts and took the Goya for best Ibero-American film.

With this award, Argentina adds its 19th Goya to the best Ibero-American film, reinforcing its dominance in this category where Chile, with five and Cuba with four, follow quite a distance behind as top winners, since these awards began to be awarded in 1987.

Binochet’s tribute to Saura

The award from the Spanish Film Academy is a bronze bust representing the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, and it was chosen because his name was representative and short, like Óscar and César, although the artist predates the invention of the seventh art.

The family of Carlos Saura, who died on Friday, collected the Goya of honor that had been attributed to him from the hands of the actress Carmen Maura, who worked with him on Ay Carmela and who described it as “A wonderful, friendly, understanding director.”

“Thank you very much to everyone who has collaborated with me in this wonderful work that is shooting a film”Saura himself wrote in a message that he had prepared to thank the award and that his wife read, Eulalia Ramon.

Among excerpts from his works, the Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade performed the 1976 song Because you are leavingby Jeanette, forever associated with Saura’s film Breeding ravens.

Considered one of the four great directors of Spanish cinema, along with Luis Buñuel, Luis García Berlanga and Pedro Almodóvar, Saura died at the age of 91 on Friday, leaving behind a career that earned him three awards at the Berlin Film Festival and two at Cannes.

The other honoree of the ceremony was the French actress Juliette Binoche58 years old, who received the international Goya saying she was proud and dedicating a memory to Saura, “a filmmaker who moved me with the eyes of a girl”before humming Because you are leaving. (YO)