Audience awards: the winners are “L'ultima via di Riccardo Bee” and “Wild Life”

Published 07/05/2023

The Rotari Audience Award for the best mountaineering film goes to Emanuele Confortin’s “L’ultima via di Riccardo Bee”. “Wild Life” by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin wins the DAO Audience Award for the best full-length film.

In addition to the official prizes awarded by the international jury and sixteen special awards, each year Trento Film Festival also assigns two audience awards. The Festival public has had the chance to vote at the website MyTFF area, allocating a number of gentians corresponding with a score going from 1 to 5. The total score determined the two winners of the 2023 edition.

The Rotari Audience Award for the best mountaineering film goes to Emanuele Confortin’s L’ultima via di Riccardo Bee (Italy/2023/90′). Riccardo Bee was one of the most talented rock climbers of his time, but his climbing feats are in part shrouded in mystery. Forty years after his death, the film is not intended as a celebration of his greatness as a climber, but rather wishes to grasp the legacy of a husband, father and friend obliged by a sort of enchantment to constantly challenge himself. Emanuele Confortin, journalist and documentary maker, deals with areas of crisis, migration and minorities on the margins of modern society, in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His projects include the documentaries Kinnaur Himalaya, presented at Trento Film Festival in 2020, and Coronavenice. A mountaineer, he is co-founder and editor of the magazine Alpinismi.com.

The DAO Audience Award for the best full-length film has instead been assigned to Wild Life by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (USA/2023/93′). Made by the Oscar-winning directors of Free Solo, Wild Life follows conservationist Kris Tompkins on an epic, decades-spanning love story as wild as the landscapes she dedicated her life to protecting. After falling in love in mid-life, Kris and the outdoorsman and entrepreneur Doug Tompkins left behind the world of the massively successful outdoor brands they’d helped pioneer – Patagonia, The North Face, and Esprit – and turned their attention to a visionary effort to create National Parks throughout Chile and Argentina. Wild Life recounts the highs and lows of their journey to effect the largest private land donation in history.