Lukas Dhont’s Close, an intimate melodrama about an intense friendship between two 13-year-old boys, has won this year’s Lux European Audience Film Award, a prize handed out by the European Parliament.
Close premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2022, where it won the Grand Jury prize. It was Belgium’s Oscar contender and was nominated for an Academy Award in the best international feature category this year.
Close is Dhont’s second feature, after his 2018 directorial debut Girl, a drama inspired by the true story of a transgender ballet dancer, which premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section and won multiple awards including the Camera d’Or for best first feature and the Queer Palm for best LGBTQ+ movie. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Dhont said Close was a “continuation of the themes in Girl [but while] Girl really talked about gender identity and the relationship with the body, [in Close] the themes are much more about friendship, intimacy and responsibility.”
Close beat out the other four films shortlisted for this year’s Lux honor: Ruben Östlund’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner, and multiple Oscar nominee, Triangle of Sadness; Carla Simón’s 2022 Berlin film festival Golden Bear winner Alcarràs; Emin Alper’s Turkish thriller Burning Days a 2022 Cannes competition title; and Will-o’-the-Wisp, a comedy-fantasy-musical from Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues, which premiered in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight sidebar.
The Lux winner was picked by European audience members, who were able to screen the nominated films at one of the more than 500 screenings set up for the event across the European Union, and by members of the European Parliament. The audience votes — around 45,000 — and those of the 360 Parliamentarians who took part were given an equal 50-50 weighting.
Dhont and his Close co-screenwriter/co-author Angelo Tijssens accepted the prize at a ceremony in Brussels on Tuesday night.