Edinburgh Film Festival: Abdolreza Kahani wins top prize

Last night, the curtain came down on the 2025 Edinburgh International Film Festival with Paul Sng’s Irvine Welsh documentary Reality Is Not Enough – it's frank, funny and thoughtful, and a must-watch for fans of this iconoclastic Edinburgh writer. Before the screening, the winners of the festival's two major prizes, The Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence and The Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for Short Filmmaking Excellence, were announced.

Both prizes are voted for by audiences, a practice I’m slightly sceptical of. Crowd-pleasing films don't always equate to “filmmaking excellence”, but in the case of The Sean Connery Prize, I think audiences have crowned a very worthy winner. The trophy – a handsome and very heavy bust of Sean Connery – and the £50,000 prize fund, donated by the Connery foundation, went to Canada-based Iranian filmmaker Abdolreza Kahani for Mortician.

Shot by Kahani on his iPhone, the film has a bracing lo-fi aesthetic (I suspect the prize money will already have the film in the black) but is full of vigour and visual invention. It centres on the chalk-and-cheese friendship that forms between a lugubrious mortician who’s under the employ of the Irianian regime, and a dissident singer whose political pop songs criticising the regime have made her a target. Full of wry humour and political fury, this one-of-a-kind film clearly struck a chord with Edinburgh audiences.

When picking up his hefty trophy, an emotional Kahani said: “Now that I have Sean Connery in my hand, I must make better films.” We’re really excited to see what this veteran filmmaker does next. Read our review of Mortician here.

The great editor Thelma Schoonmaker lends her name to the shorts competition and was in town to present the trophy and the £15,000 prize. Ahead of handing out the award, she reminded audiences that her regular collaborator, Martin Scorsese, whom Schoonmaker has edited well over 20 features for, got his big break making short films because it alerted a legendary film critic to his talents. Schoonmaker said: “I want to say to everyone who did compete in the short film competition, it was Scorsese’s short film It's Not Just You, Murray! that brought him to the attention of Roger Ebert, a great critic in the United States, who then championed him, so making these short movies is extremely important.”

The prize went to Joanna Vymeris for Mother Goose, which concerns a widow’s connection to the goose she’s hand-rearing for Christmas dinner. EIFF describe the film as a modern-day Grimms' fairy tale about grief, isolation and, well, a goose. 

“These past seven days are testament to our collective belief in the power of film to provoke, to stimulate and to inspire empathy,” says Paul Ridd, the festival’s director. “Our two competition winners showcase outstanding work from their respective filmmakers and teams, proving that with formal dexterity, humanity and grace, cinema is alive and kicking.”