This Saturday the following awards were presented at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona: 15th Solé Tura Awards, awards that recognize the best feature film and short film of the Brain Film Fest 2025. The contest, which we promoted in co-organization with Minimal Films and which this year has been attended by more than 4,000 spectators, has programmed more than forty productions in the two official competitive sections and yesterday brought its eighth edition to a close.
Two Colombian titles lead the competition's list of winners. On the one hand, the documentary Ana Rosa, from the director Catalina Villar, has been recognized with the 15th Solé Tura Award for best feature filmVillar proposes a journey into the history of psychiatry and delves into her own family memory through the recollection of her paternal grandmother, a woman lobotomized in the 1950s in Colombia. The surgical procedure, which affects more women than men, is one of the cruelest examples of 20th-century biopolitics. The jury, composed of Ariadna Dot, Eduard Fernández, and Dr. Jesús Porta Etessam, recognized the Colombian film for "making visible a practice that is still present in our society today, as well as for its ability to move from a specific and personal story to the universality of this subject."
The production is also Colombian Pirsas, Angelica M. Torres Tamayo, recognized with the 15th Solé Tura Award for Best Short Film. It addresses from an intimate perspective the tragedy of Scout Group No. 4 Pirsas on March 18, 2006, at the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia, where eleven children died, including the director's brother. The jury, composed of Maria Molins, Javier Giner, and Pere Estupinyà, chose it for the courage of the director and "for her honesty, emotion, and rigor in discussing this difficult subject and explaining what sudden grief is like."
The Souleymane's Story, Boris Lojkine, has received a special mention from the jury "for explaining the fear of migrants and treating mental illness as a class issue. For its ability to portray loneliness through what we have in front of us, but do not want to see, and for the great acting work of its protagonist." The French production has also been recognized with the Audience Award for Best Feature Film.
The Brain Film Fest audience has awarded the Audience Award for Best Short Film to As always, a production of the brothers Pau and Anna Bacardit which delves into the acceptance of metastatic cancer.
In addition to the prizes for the competitive sections, there is the Brain Film Fest 2025 Special Award for Nicolas PhilibertThe documentary filmmaker received the honorary award on March 12 for his transformative trilogy on mental health filmed in psychiatric centers in Paris. His latest film, The typewriter and other sources of problems, the final point of the trilogy that began in 2023 with To the Adamant (Sur l'Adamant, 2023), winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin, and continued in 2024 with Averroès and Rosa Parks, have been present in the programming.
