It’s award season everywhere but I have to confess some admiration for the Irina Palm d’Or:
For critics, such films have now become a fact of life, the lumpen low-budget yang to the sprightly, ingenious yin of, say, Nick Whitfield’s Skeletons and Gareth Edwards’s forthcoming Monsters. Barber confesses to a certain admiration for the prizewinners thus far: “We’ve all heard how difficult it is to get a film made in Britain, so when you see one that seems like a terrible idea on every level, you do have a weird kind of respect for whoever got it up there on the screen. Irina-makers belong to a fine British tradition of plucky, have-a-go heroes.”
[From The Irina Palm d’Or: And the loser is … | Film | guardian.co.uk]
For what it’s worth I didn’t seem to mind Irina Palm.