22nd International Cinephile Society (ICS) Awards: ‘All We Imagine as Light’ Tops the Ballot

Payal Kapadia‘s poetic All We Imagine as Light has topped the 22nd International Cinephile Society (ICS) awards, being named Best Picture, Best Director and Best Ensemble.

Runner-up in four major categories – picture, director, lead actress (Léa Seydoux) and screenplay (a soul-searching, time-hopping adaptation of a Henry James novella) – was Bertrand Bonello’s wildly inventive The Beast. The film did garner one win, for Katia Wyszkop‘s striking production design featuring dramatic cityscapes of the past, present and future.

Iconic director Mike Leigh gifted us with a new contemporary drama, Hard Truths, winner of both our lead and supporting actress trophies. British legend Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Pansy, an anxiety-plagued woman unable to trust or enjoy her family’s prickly love. By contrast, her sister Chantelle (the equally wonderful Michele Austin) brings a joyous warmth to everything she does. Mike Leigh also claimed the original screenplay award for his character-driven story spiced with dark humor.

Charismatic newcomer Abou Sangaré madly cycled his way to two ICS awards, for lead actor (a tie) and breakthrough performance. In Souleymane’s Story, he gives a deeply moving, vulnerable turn as a stressed-out Guinean immigrant on the streets of Paris, delivering food orders while the clock ticks toward his crucial asylum interview. The other half of the lead actor tie went to Mahmood Bakri for To a Land Unknown, also depicting an immigrant (Palestinian, this time) who is stuck in Athens despite all his best-laid schemes. Our supporting actor winner was Aram Sabbagh from the same film, for so poignantly playing Bakri’s cousin and sidekick, who battles addiction and is forced to do things that go against his kindly nature in order to survive.

Nickel Boys, the story of Black teenagers caged in an abusive and potentially deadly reform school, took best adapted screenplay honors, a brilliant work of humanist writing by auteur RaMell Ross and co-writer Joslyn Barnes, based on the book by Colson Whitehead. The film also won our cinematography award for Jomo Fray‘s innovative lensing.

Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis won the animated film category with his gorgeous, painterly Flow, a climate change tale of mismatched critters (paranoid Cat, wistful Dog, unbothered Capybara and hoarding Lemur) stranded together on a boat swept away by surging floodwaters. Their dialogue-free, naturalistic and occasionally mystical interactions are overseen by a tall, morose Secretary Bird whom little Cat eventually takes as a mentor, of sorts. The film’s haunting scenes of a lost human civilization, and of animals learning teamwork in a mysteriously changing world, should resonate with us all.

Here is the complete list of winners and runners-up of the 22nd ICS Awards.

PICTURE
01. All We Imagine as Light
02. The Beast
03. Nickel Boys
04. Hard Truths
05. Misericordia
06. Afternoons of Solitude
07. To a Land Unknown
08. Grand Tour
09. Evil Does Not Exist
10. Caught by the Tides
11. The Other Way Around
12. The Room Next Door
13. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
14. The Brutalist
15. Challengers
16. Megalopolis
17. Anora
18. I Saw the TV Glow
19. Juror #2
20. The Substance

DIRECTOR
Winner: Payal Kapadia – All We Imagine as Light
RU: Bertrand Bonello – The Beast

• Brady Corbet – The Brutalist 
• Miguel Gomes – Grand Tour
• Alain Guiraudie – Misericordia
• RaMell Ross – Nickel Boys
• Jane Schoenbrun – I Saw the TV Glow

ACTOR
Winner: Mahmood Bakri – To a Land Unknown 
Winner: Abou Sangaré – Souleymane’s Story 

• Adam Bessa – Ghost Trail
• Adrien Brody – The Brutalist 
• Daniel Craig – Queer
• Colman Domingo – Sing Sing 
• Keith Kupferer – Ghostlight

ACTRESS
Winner: Marianne Jean-Baptiste – Hard Truths 
RU: Léa Seydoux – The Beast

• Nicole Kidman – Babygirl 
• Kani Kusruti – All We Imagine as Light
• Demi Moore – The Substance 
• Fernanda Torres – I’m Still Here

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Winner: Aram Sabbagh – To a Land Unknown 
RU: Adam Pearson – A Different Man

• Yura Borisov – Anora 
• Guy Pearce – The Brutalist 
• Ricardo Teodoro – Baby
• Brandon Wilson – Nickel Boys

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Winner: Michele Austin – Hard Truths 
RU: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor – Nickel Boys

• Joan Chen – Didi 
• Chhaya Kadam – All We Imagine as Light
• Aubrey Plaza – Megalopolis 
• Divya Prabha – All We Imagine as Light

ENSEMBLE
Winner: All We Imagine as Light
RU: Hard Truths 

• Anora 
• Conclave
• Ghostlight 
• Misericordia 

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Winner: Hard Truths – Mike Leigh
RU: All We Imagine as Light – Payal Kapadia

• Anora –  Sean Baker
• Challengers – Justin Kuritzkes 
• Misericordia – Alain Guiraudie
• The Seed of the Sacred Fig – Mohammad Rasoulof

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Winner: Nickel Boys – RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes
RU: The Beast – Bertrand Bonello, Benjamin Charbit, Guillaume Bréaud

• Conclave –  Peter Straughan
• I’m Still Here – Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega 
• Queer – Justin Kuritzkes
• The Room Next Door – Pedro Almodóvar

CINEMATOGRAPHY
Winner: Nickel Boys – Jomo Fray
RU: Afternoons of Solitude – Artur Tort

• All We Imagine as Light – Ranabir Das 
• The Brutalist – Lol Crawley
• Grand Tour – Guo Liang, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Rui Poças
• Nosferatu – Jarin Blaschke 

EDITING
Winner: Afternoons of Solitude – Albert Serra, Artur Tort
RU: Caught by the Tides – Yang Chao, Matthieu Laclau, Xudong Lin

• All We Imagine as Light – Clément Pinteaux 
• Challengers – Marco Costa
• Grand Tour – Telmo Churro, Pedro Filipe Marques
• Mexico will no longer exist! – Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco

PRODUCTION DESIGN
Winner: The Beast – Katia Wyszkop
RU: Queer – Stefani Baisi 

• The Brutalist – Judy Becker
• Nosferatu – Craig Lathrop
• The Room Next Door – Inbal Weinberg
• The Substance – Stanislas Reydellet

SCORE
Winner: Blue Giant – Hiromi Uehara
RU: Challengers – Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross

• The Brutalist – Daniel Blumberg
• Evil Does Not Exist – Eiko Ishibashi
• Ghost Trail – Lucas Verreman, Yuksek 
• Nickel Boys – Scott Alario, Alex Somers

SOUND DESIGN
Winner: Pepe – Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias, Nahuel Palenque
RU: Dahomey – Nicolas Becker

• The Brutalist – Andy Neil, Steve Single
• Challengers – Craig Berkey, Paul Carter
• Dune: Part Two – Richard King, Dave Whitehead
• The Substance – Valérie Deloof, Victor Fleurant

ANIMATED FILM
Winner: Flow – Gints Zilbalodis 
RU: Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass – Quay Brothers

• Blue Giant – Yuzuru Tachikawa
• Memoir of a Snail – Adam Elliot
• Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl – Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham
• The Wild Robot – Chris Sanders

DOCUMENTARY
Winner: Afternoons of Solitude – Albert Serra
RU: No Other Land – Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor

• Alma del Desierto – Mónica Taboada Tapia
• Dahomey – Mati Diop
• A Fidai Film – Kamal Aljafari
• Intercepted – Oksana Karpovych

DEBUT FILM
Winner: Blue Sun Palace – Constance Tsang 
RU: Ghost Trail – Jonathan Millet

• Janet Planet – Annie Baker
• Mexico will no longer exist! – Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco
• No Other Land – Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
• Problemista – Julio Torres

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE
Winner: Abou Sangaré – Souleymane’s Story
RU: Mikey Madison – Anora

• Mahmood Bakri – To a Land Unknown 
• Jack Haven – I Saw the TV Glow
• Clarence Maclin – Sing Sing
• Ryland Brickson Cole Tews – Hundreds of Beavers

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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