Pedro Almodovar, winner of the 1999 European Film Award and the 1999 people's Choice Award for Best European Director for 'Todo Sobre Mi Madre', and Cecilia Roth, winner of the 1999 European Actress Award for 'Todo Sobre Mi Madre'. |
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It was the kind of moment you can´t plan for but that every producer of an awards ceremony prays will happen. It came right at the end of the 1999 European Film Awards at the Schiller Theater in Berlin on the evening of Saturday, December 4, 1999.
The occasion was the climax of the evening, just before everyone headed off to celebrate at Fernsehstudio EventIsland. First, though, the evening´s top prize - European Film of the Year - had to be presented. On hand to do the honours was Spanish-born Hollywood star Antonio Banderas, who had earlier picked up a European Achievement in World Cinema Award - one of two such honours (the other went to Roman Polanski).
Banderas had flown into Berlin specially with his wife, Melanie Griffith (whom he recently directed in Crazy in Alabama, his behind-the-camera debut), and she was up on stage with him to hand out the ceremony´s crowning achievement.
By the time the nominations for European Film of the Year were read out, most audience members with even a passing familiarity with the films of hot favourite Pedro Almodóvar must have realised what was going to happen.
And it did: the Hollywood star presented the Award for European Film of the Year to the director who had given him his first major break eleven years earlier in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).
For all that everyone was expecting it, it proved an emotional moment. Banderas dropped to his knees, holding the statuette up to his former mentor. Almodóvar momentarily seemed to lose the cool assurance he had shown earlier in the evening, when he had been up on stage to accept another Award: the People´s Choice Award, voted on by ordinary cinemagoers from around Europe (whereas the main EFA Awards are voted on, like the Oscars, by the Academy´s membership) for the same film. And again, when Cecilia Roth, another long-time collaborator, had climbed the steps to pick up the Best Actress Award.
However, the Man from La Mancha quickly recovered his expansive poise, threw his arms round Banderas and Griffith and declared, “This is my American family!”
As well as being the climax of the evening, the bringing together on stage of Banderas, Griffith and Almodóvar stressed, in a way that no amount of press-releases and speech-making could have done, just how important European cinema is to Hollywood (not, as we are constantly told, vice versa), and just how close the links between the two have recently become.
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