Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value overwhelmingly won at the 38th European Film Awards in Berlin on January 17, taking the ceremony’s so-called “big five”: best film, best director for Trier, best actor for Stellan Skarsgård, best actress for Renate Reinsve, as well as best screenplay and best score.
Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, an aging, once-celebrated director who walked out on his wife and two children chasing artistic success. He returns hoping to rebuild a relationship with his estranged daughter Nora (Reinsve), now a prominent actress — and to persuade her to take a part he has written, inspired by his mother, who killed herself when he was a child. Nora, deeply depressed and unforgiving, and Gustav, both convinced that cinema might reconnect them, find the attempt falters; the film refuses tidy reconciliation.
Critics have situated Trier’s picture in the lineage of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Its visual approach reads like a primer in film history: flashbacks render the 1920s in hand-cranked black-and-white 16mm, the 1970s with handheld, New Hollywood jitter, and the 1990s in a lush, painterly gloss. That formal adventurousness and inward focus — anchored in continental film traditions rather than studio conventions — is often read as quintessentially European.
The European Film Academy’s roughly 5,400 members rewarded the film’s technical and artistic control, and their sweeping support also serves a strategic purpose: the Academy moved the EFAs from December into January to place the awards inside the wider Oscars season, between the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards, to amplify buzz for European contenders.
Sentimental Value is already being discussed as an Oscar contender. A best international feature nomination is widely expected; acting nominations for Skarsgård and Reinsve are frequently predicted (Skarsgård has a Golden Globe to his name); even a best picture nomination has been floated. By anointing Trier’s film now, the EFAs position European cinema to claim influence if the film succeeds at the Oscars.
Some critics and observers, however, felt the night underplayed the full breadth of contemporary European filmmaking. That broader range did receive recognition in the crafts categories: Oliver Laxe’s Sirat, Spain’s Oscar submission, won five technical awards — cinematography, editing, production design, sound and casting. Sirat is a genre-defying, surreal road movie that opens at an underground rave in the Moroccan desert. A father and son arrive to look for a missing daughter/sister; the appearance of the military pushes the film toward dystopia amid hints of a looming war or ecological collapse. The protagonists join a nomadic group of ravers and traverse wastelands as Laxe repeatedly shifts tone and form.
Another striking absence among the winners was Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, his first film since his 2022 release from prison. The film is a taut moral thriller set in contemporary Tehran: a former political prisoner, now working as a car mechanic, believes he recognizes his torturer — identified by a squeaky prosthetic leg — and abducts him to bury him alive. Having been blindfolded in prison, the protagonist is uncertain he has the right man and drives through the city, recruiting other former prisoners to weigh revenge against mercy. The film’s suspense and moral tension earned comparisons to Hitchcock.
Panahi did not leave the EFAs empty-handed of voice: he used his platform to speak on Iran. Ahead of the ceremony he read a statement condemning the brutal crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran, citing reports of thousands killed and many more detained, and appealed for international attention. “When the truth is crushed in one place, freedom suffocates everywhere,” he said, urging the world not to stay silent.
The ceremony also included a roundtable discussion — featuring nominees such as Trier, Panahi, Laxe and Mascha Schilinski — about European cinema’s willingness to take risks, highlighting the continent’s ongoing appetite for formally daring and politically engaged films. The program was edited by Elizabeth Grenier.