The annual SCORE Bernhard Wicki Award is a competition for extraordinary feature films and is decided on by audience vote. The award goes to the feature film with the highest audience rating in the competition. This year, we have the honor of PIECE OF MY HEART winning the prize.
The award itself was named after the great director Bernhard Wicki (1919-2000). With this award the Festival honours his services to German filmmaking as well as to the development of the Emden Film Festival in the years 1990 to 1999.
The SCORE Bernhard Wicki Award has a purse of € 10,000 provided by the SCORE-Tankstellen und Mineralölhandels-GmbH.
PIECE OF MY HEART was initiated by Bracha van Doesburgh and Daan Schuurmans and is inspired by the story of the Dutch ballerina Olga de Haas. With De Haas as their starting point, Daan and Bracha, in collaboration with director Dana Nechushtan and screenwriter Roos Ouwehand, have arrived at a fictitious and impressive story about friendship, the dance world and the price of fame. Igone de Jongh provided the choreography for the ballet scenes.
The film is produced by Frans van Gestel, Arnold Heslenfeld and Laurette Schillings of Topkapi Films (My Father is an Airplane, Another Round, Instinct) and is co-produced in collaboration with NTR, Triangle Film (Bracha van Doesburgh & DaanSchuurmans) and Eyeworks Belgium (Peter Bouckaert).
Dancers Elaine Meijerink and Roos Englebert have been selected for their versatile leading roles after casting sessions in the Netherlands and Belgium. They are surrounded by well-known actors such as Peter Paul Muller, Daniël Boissevain, Gijs Scholten van Aschat, Katelijne Damen, Yannick Jozefzoon, Gijs Blom, Tina de Bruin and Jan Kooijman.
PIECE OF MY HEART was created in the context of the annual collaboration between the Netherlands Film Fund, NPO, the CoBO Fund and is stimulated by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, under the name Telescoop. In addition, the film is supported by the Netherlands Film Production Incentive, the Abraham Tuschinski Fund, Screen Flanders and the Belgian Tax Shelter and Equity Investors. The film was developed with support from the MEDIA program of the European Union. Film distributor WW Entertainment has released PIECE OF MY HEART in the Benelux.