‘The Home Game’ Wins Glasgow Film Festival Audience Award

Icelandic football film The Home Game has scooped prestigious Audience Award of Glasgow Film Festival. The 20th edition closed in style tonight with the announcement of the winner ahead the World Premiere of Janey.

Glasgow Film Festival’s Audience Award this year was sponsored by MUBI. The Home Game was chosen by the most important people at the festival, the audience. It was up against an eight-strong shortlist of films by first or second-time directors, a list that included Viggo Mortensen’s Western The Dead Don’t Hurt.

it was feel-good Icelandic football documentary that netted the highest-ever audience score in the Award’s 10-year history. Last year’s winner Anthony Shim‘s Riceboy Sleeps won the award by one vote!

The Home Game is a true story of plucky village football team. In 1994 one man in the Icelandic village of Hellissandur (population: 369) had a dream to build a professional standard football pitch and play a home game in the country’s FA Cup. He managed his first objective, but the side drew an away game and fell to a 10-0 defeat. Fast-forward to 2020 and his son Kari takes up the gauntlet, re-forming Reynir FC with a ragtag bunch of locals including handy 15-year-old schoolboy rapper David Svanur Hafthorsson, 40-something big man in goal Gunnar Orn Arnarson, and former Iceland Women’s Team international Freydis Bjarnadottir, whose inclusion in the team threatens them with disqualification from the FA.

Smari Gunn and Logi Sigursveinsson’s crowd-pleasing documentary follows their journey in an uplifting celebration of team and community spirit for underdogs everywhere.

The film’s  directors Smari Gunn and Logi Sigursveinsson said: “We are incredibly proud to receive this honour at Glasgow Film Festival. Being a small film from Iceland, it means so much for us to get this recognition and the opportunity to share the story of these loveable Icelandic villagers, as far and wide as possible. Everyone at GFF has been so welcoming to us and the audience reactions really blew us away. Huge thanks to all the people that came out, watched the film, and showed such warmth and . Thank you Glasgow!”

Allison Gardner, Director of Glasgow Film Festival and CEO of Glasgow Film, said: “We are delighted that The Home Game has won the audience award, our audiences are the best in the world and we can’t thank them enough. We have had a brilliant time welcoming guests to the festival and I want to warmly thank MUBI for their of our Audience Award.”

Congratulations to The Home Game,  unfortunately the film clashed with the films we were watching at Glasgow Film Festival. We will a few more reviews coming right up over the next few weeks including tonight’s closing gala Janey.