Family Therapy wins the Arthouse Cinema Award at Sarajevo Film Festival • CICAE

At the 30th Sarajevo Film Festival, the film Family Therapy by Sonja Prosenc received the Arthouse Cinema Award by the CICAE jury.

The jury, formed by Bruno Castro (Alvalade Cineclube, Lisbon, Portugal), Monica Naldi (Cinema Beltrade, Milan, Italy), and Franco Savelli (Cinemaincentro, Ravenna, Italy), stated as following:

"Family is a box which can contain love, but also the most bizarre and grotesque dynamics, through which love may in the end disappear.
When a foreign body enters this box, framed in a house of glass and a 4/3 format, it unveils these paradoxes not through traumatic and violent acts, but by the means of empathy, the power of difference and the energy of youth.
This multi-layered and original view on the bourgeousie leads us on a path of redemption.
Hope is a possibility even for the privileged ones."

FAMILY THERAPY revolves around a nouveau riche Slovenian family who live in a glass house, exuding an air of detached superiority. This serves as a satirical backdrop for a humorous re-imagining of the premise of Pier Paolo Pasolini's TEOREMA: a young stranger arrives in the family household, disrupting the delicate balance of family dynamics and revealing a world of chaos and dysfunctional relationships hidden beneath the surface. Through this family's story, the film explores contemporary social issues in the tone of tragicomedy.

Directed by: Sonja Prosenc

Written by: Sonja Prosenc

Cinematographer: Mitja Ličen

Editing: Ivana Fumić

Music by: Primož Hladnik, Boris Benko

Cast: Mila Bezjak, Aliocha Schneider, Marko Mandic, Katarina Stegnar, Judita Franković Brdar, Jure Henigman

Production:

The CICAE Arthouse Cinema Award was conceived as an impetus for a film to have a wider recognition as a work of art and to stand as a mark of quality for cinema-goers and cinephiles.