The Edinburgh International Film Festival has now ended and they’ve handed out their awards, with Moon, starring Sam Rockwell, winning the Michael Powell Award for best new British Feature. The movie picked up the award after a successful showing at the Festival, becoming the first movie to sell out.
Duncan Jones’ Moon is beloved by many critics, telling the story of an astronaut towards the end of his three-year mission to the Moon, where he works alongside his robot to send resources back to Earth. However he discovers that his lonely existence is quite what it appears. The fillm opens in cinemas around the rest of the country on July 17th.
The other main prize at the festival, Best International Feature, went to Easier With Patience, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s film about a writer on a promotional tour who receives an erotic phone call from a stranger.
Interestingly both movies are from first time directors, which would seem to back up claims by the organisers that Ediburgh is a ‘discovery festival’ (although that said, Moon was discovered at Sundance first). The two-week long event has been seen as a big success, with the overall box office rising 3.5% despite the global economin downturn.