A Finnish film won the Audience Award at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday night.
The Blind Man Who Didn’t Want to See Titanic was directed by Teemu Nikki. It stars Petri Poikolainen as a blind man in a wheelchair who travels alone to visit the woman of his dreams.
The Armani beauty Audience Award is a new prize, awarded in the Venice Festival’s Orizzonti Extra (Horizons Extra) category.
The 82-minute film tells the story of a blind man in a wheelchair who travels solo to visit the woman of his dreams.
While the film was still in production last year, it won the Eurimages Lab Project Award at the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund.
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The film marks a comeback of sorts for Poikolainen, 46. After graduating from the Uniarts Helsinki's Theatre Academy in 2000, he had a successful career as a stage actor before becoming blind and partly paralysed due to multiple sclerosis about eight years ago.
The Blind Man is Nikki’s second feature film, following the dark 2017 drama Euthanizer, which wasFinland’s nominee for the 2018 foreign-language Oscar Award.
The movie, which was shot in the Tampere-Nokia region, opened in Finnish cinemas on Saturday, and opens in Italy and elsewhere next week.