Andrew Legge’s sci-fi LOLA becomes the first Irish film to win the Méliès d’Or at the 56th Sitges Film Festival. The Méliès d'Or is an award presented annually by the Méliès International Festivals Federation (MIFF), an international network of genre film festivals.
The Sitges Film Festival, or Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, is an annual festival dedicated to horror and fantastic film cinema. This year, Andrew Legge’s LOLA has taken home the Méliès d’Or, the award for best speculative fiction.
LOLA is Legge’s feature film debut. The found footage science fiction film follows two sisters who invent a machine that can receive broadcasts from the future. With the Second World War escalating, the sisters decide to use the machine to intercept information from the future that could help with military intelligence. This initially proves to be a huge success, until one sister makes a fatal error that leads to a nightmarish future.
IFTN spoke with Legge about his unique filmmaking process, and LOLA’s gradual success on the festival circuit earlier this year.
Previous films that have received the award include Gaspar Noé’s Climax, Julia Ducournau’s Raw, Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In, and most recently, Carlota Pereda’s Piggy. The award was introduced in 1996 for science fiction, fantasy, and horror films, and named after French director Georges Méliès.
Speaking on the award, writer/director Andrew Legge said: “It’s an amazing honour to win this year’s Méliès d’or and to be recognised alongside the best genre movies of the past number of years, including Raw, one of my favourite films of the past decade.”
LOLA is the first Irish film to receive the award. The most awarded country is Spain with seven awards, followed by Denmark and the United Kingdom with four.
