Kuwait Times

Published Date: October 23, 2008

The European Parliament on Wednesday awarded its cinema prize to Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne for their film "The Silence of Lorna", already feted at the Cannes Film Festival. The Lux prize and its Tower of Babel-inspired trophy, awarded only for the second time, means the mainly French-language film will now be subtitled in all 22 other official EU languages.

The objective is to break the language barrier which can hamper the international distribution of European films. "This prize is very important because we know that European cinema has had lots of problems compared to another giant (Hollywood) which has lots of money," said Dardenne, receiving the prize in the Strasbourg assembly chamber.

We have a real problem in Europe, where we don't see enough films from some countries. We don't see films from Lithuania, Latvia or Poland, or at least very few," he added. "The Silence of Lorna" has a very European provenance, being billed as a Belgian, British, French, Italian production.

It is a drama about immigration starring Arta Dobroshi as an Albanian emigrant who is in Belgium thanks to a fake marriage to a young drug addict. Turkish-born Fatih Akin, the German director of "The Edge of Heaven", won the European Parliament's first Lux prize for cinema last year. -- AFP