The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

The Durban International Film Festival announced the winners of its audience awards for 2014. The winning feature is The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared from Swedish director Felix Herngren, and the DIFF 2014 audience award for best documentary goes to 1994: The Bloody Miracle, directed by Meg Rickards and Bert Haisma.  Based on the internationally best-selling novel by Jonas Jonasson, the energetically oddball black comedy, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared from Swedish director Felix Herngren, begins with irrepressible pensioner and dynamite expert Allan Karlsson’s escape from a retirement home. His subsequent cross-county shenanigans are interspersed with flashbacks to a past studded with extraordinary events and famous historical figures. Highly entertaining, its pastiche of history refracted through the life of an eccentric is reminiscent of a darker take on Forrest Gump. The film received nearly unanimous votes of excellent from the DIFF audience.

1994: The Bloody Miracle

The DIFF 2014 audience award for best documentary goes to 1994: The Bloody Miracle, directed by Meg Rickards and Bert Haisma. As South Africa celebrates the 20th anniversary of the advent of democracy, the film chronicles the countless deaths and widespread mayhem which nearly brought South Africa to its knees in the early ‘90s and speaks to the hard men who did their best to thwart the transition to democracy and who have now made an uneasy peace with the ‘Rainbow Nation’.