Dheepan and Paulina lead Miami’s film awards

Dheepan and Paulina have taken major prizes at the thirty-third Miami International Film Festival. Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan won the Knight Competition grand jury prize, while Santiago Mitre’s Paulina received the Lexus Ibero-American feature film prize.

The separate awards point to the festival’s overlapping interests: international cinema in a broad sense and the particular importance of work from the Ibero-American world. Keeping those strands in the same program allows Miami audiences to make connections without treating all films as parts of one uniform category.

The awards ceremony also recognized Lorenzo Vigas for the screenplay of From Afar. Together, the results provide several routes into the program for viewers who missed screenings. A festival’s closing weekend need not be the end of its discoveries; it can become the moment when audiences decide which filmmakers and films deserve a place on their next viewing list.