Like Any Other Mortal, María Molina Peiró’s Spanish-Dutch film shot around the Rio Tinto mining district in Andalusia, has won the International Competition at the 67th Festival dei Popoli in Florence. The prize, worth €7,000 ($7,800), was announced at the closing ceremony at Cinema La Compagnia on 7 November, alongside the Italian Competition award for Letizia Buoso’s Quando è pronto, il fieno canta. The festival’s results were published by Cinecittà News, the news service of Istituto Luce Cinecittà, on 8 November.
The two choices pull in different directions. Molina Peiró’s film is a hybrid that borrows from science fiction to look at colonialism and extraction, moving from religious processions to microscopic life and out to the cosmos. Buoso’s is an autobiographical film that uses one family’s story to build a shared historical memory. Between them they map the range the festival says it wants to defend: political subject matter on one side, formal experiment on the other.
Key facts
- Festival: 67th Festival dei Popoli, Florence; awards announced 7 November 2026 at Cinema La Compagnia
- International Competition: Like Any Other Mortal (María Molina Peiró; Spain, Netherlands), first prize €7,000 ($7,800); second prize €4,000 ($4,500) to The Price of the Sun (Jérôme le Maire; Belgium, France, Morocco)
- Italian Competition: Quando è pronto, il fieno canta (Letizia Buoso; Italy), first prize €3,000 ($3,350)
- Discoveries: How to Catch a Butterfly (Kiriko Mechanicus; Netherlands), €3,500 ($3,900)
- Four further prizes are distribution commitments, two theatrical, one on demand and one from CG Entertainment; their terms were not disclosed
The winners
The complete list, as published in the festival’s awards announcement:
International Competition (jury: Petra Seliškar, Mercedes Álvarez and Erika Balsom)
First prize, €7,000: Like Any Other Mortal (María Molina Peiró; Spain, Netherlands)
Second prize, €4,000: The Price of the Sun (Jérôme le Maire; Belgium, France, Morocco)
Special mention: For Life (Ahmet Seven; Turkey)
Targa Gian Paolo Paoli for best anthropological film: Who Cares (Ina Ivanceanu; Austria)
Italian Competition (jury: Alma Mileto, Riccardo Costantini and Aline Hervé)
First prize, €3,000: Quando è pronto, il fieno canta (Letizia Buoso; Italy)
Special mention: Schiuma di mondi (Anna Marziano; Italy, Germany)
AMC prize from the Associazione Montaggio Cinematografico e Televisivo, for editing: Federico Conti, Controvento
Discoveries (jury: Babette Dieu, Vanja Jambrović and Leonor Teles)
Discoveries prize, €3,500: How to Catch a Butterfly (Kiriko Mechanicus; Netherlands)
Special mention: Home Is Where the Heart Is (Timothée Engasser; France)
Discoveries youth jury: Il velo dei sensi (Elisa Baccolo; Italy)
Popoli Kids&Teens
Young Jury Day prize: Almost Forever (Lia Hietala and Hannah Reinikainen)
Distribution and social-impact prizes
OpenDDB prize for best Italian social-impact documentary, given for the first time this year: Luana, ragazza (Ernesto Pagano; Italy)
CG Entertainment “POPOLI Doc” distribution prize for best Italian film: Finché resta il tuo nome (Gianmarco d’Agostino)
CG Digital on-demand distribution prize for best European film in the Habitat section, with release on the cgtv.it platform: Techplomacy (Susanne Kovács)
Gli Imperdibili theatrical distribution prize from Cinema La Compagnia: Luana, ragazza
“Il Cinemino” theatrical distribution prize, chosen by the team at the Milan cinema of that name: Il grande buco (Davide Crudetti; Italy, France)
Amnesty International Italia “Diritti Umani” (human rights) prize: Luana, ragazza
The juries
The international jury called the winner a conceptual and spectacular film that questions the idea of life itself and asks viewers to imagine timescales beyond the human one. Le Maire’s second-prize film is set in an arid part of Morocco’s Atlas region, where Amazigh (Berber) residents weigh up the construction of a vast solar park. The Italian jury described Buoso’s film as a layered work about uncertainty, family ties, migration and the fragility of memory, in which the director’s own point of view becomes one more layer alongside the history of the land and of the people who live on it.
Pagano’s Luana, ragazza is the only title to take three awards, carrying a theatrical commitment in Florence, a new social-impact prize and Amnesty’s human rights award into its domestic release. Artistic director Alessandro Stellino said the results reflected the selection committee’s work and the festival’s openness to the many forms of contemporary documentary, and that he was pleased the juries had rewarded films in the festival’s tradition of attention to social and political themes and to research and experiment.
The four cash prizes listed in the announcement total €17,500 ($19,500). The value of the distribution awards, the number of screens or the length of any on-demand window were not disclosed. Dollar figures are converted at the European Central Bank’s reference rate of 6 November, $1.1165 to the euro.
Our reading
For sales agents working the European documentary circuit, the international winners are the titles to track. Like Any Other Mortal and The Price of the Sun both deal with land, extraction and energy, and both are majority-European co-productions shot on the edges of the continent, a profile that travels well to Ji.hlava, IDFA and the spring documentary markets. For Italian producers, the more practical outcome sits lower in the list: Luana, ragazza now carries a theatrical commitment in Florence, a social-impact award and a human rights prize into its domestic release. In a market where creative documentaries rarely get screens without an event behind them, that combination is worth more than the cheque.
Related: Ji.hlava’s top prize for James Longley’s Mohabat; Italy’s cinema reform clears the Senate; Camerimage 2026 opens with Guadagnino’s Artificial; Thessaloniki’s Agora co-production picks.