2016 Winners

Best short film (awarded to the Director)

  • The Confession by Fr Johnn La Raw (South Korea)

– A young priest that hears the confession of a man who years before, drunk behind the wheel of his car, ran over a man and killed him on the walkway. He didn’t give himself up to the police, but ran away from the accident site. For years, his conscience tortured him, reminding, above all, that man’s child crying desperately. What he didn’t know is that this child grew up and became a priest, the priest who was hearing his confession. The ending is unpredictable. 

Best documentary (Awarded to the Director)

  • A Life is Never Wasted by Krzysztof Tadej (Poland)

– It’s a film about life and death, love and hate. It tells the tragic death of two Polish missionaries, Fathers Michael Tomaszek (31 years old) and Zbigniew Strałkowski (33), who went to Peru in order to spread the message of God and were killed with a shot in the neck by the communist terrorists belonging to Sendero Luminoso. On December 5, 2015, the Church decided to beatify them.

Best Director (awarded to the Director)

  • Lampedusa by Peter Schreiner (Austria)

– Two strangers cross their roads on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa: an ex refugee from Africa and a woman who goes to the island to deal with a personal crisis. Their memories, dreams and present intersect and come together in this contemplative black and white masterpiece.

Best film (awarded to the Producer)

  • Poveda by Pablo Moreno (Spain) – Producer: Andrés Garrigò (Goya Producciones)

– Father Pedro Poveda (1874 – 1936) was a priest who fought for women’s rights and the improvement of the education of children. Victim of intolerance, he was killed during the Spanish Civil War because he did not want to renounce his faith. St. John Paul II canonized him in 2003. 

Capax Dei Foundation Award

  • Kateri by James Kelty (U.S.A.) – a EWTN/James Kelty Production

 – A film about the life of Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American (squaw) canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. It’s an emblematic story of faith. Her name brings us to the tribe of the Mohawks, in which the saint was born in 1656, near Albany, not far from New York. Her father was a leader of the Iroquois, while her mother was Algonquin, but she found and converted the Christian faith. Four years later, the smallpox epidemic hit Kateri’s life, taking her parents away and leaving some injuries in her face and eyes. It is by 1675 that she gets closer to Christianity, when three French missionaries arrived in her village: Kateri was fascinated by these persons, so much to ask them for the baptism just one year after. However, her choice put her against her uncle, who hosted her since she was an orphan: she was left without food on Sunday, because she refused to work in order to sanctify the feast day; she refused to get married with a young redskin and remained a virgin. One of the missionaries recommended her one day to move close to Montreal, and to consecrate her life to the prayer in a St. Francis Xavier mission. After having made vow of chastity, in 1680, just 24 years old, a sudden illness brought her to the death, after which every sign of smallpox disappeared from her face.

Longlife Achievement Award (to a Catholic personality of the entertainment industry)

  • Bibi Ballandi (TV Producer and creator of famous artists).

Discoverer of great talents (Gigliola Cinquetti, Fiorello, I Volo) and producer of TV programs with Vasco Rossi, Adriano Celentano, Gianni Morandi and Panariello, he has the ability to bring the artists to faith.