Irish/Scottish co-production Citadel, the psychological horror debut from talented Irish writer/director Ciarán Foy picked up an Audience Award at the interactive SXSW international film and music festival in Austin, Texas.
This award follows on from the critical acclaim the film has received since its world premiere as part of the Midnighters section of the festival.
Director Ciaran Foy said: “Between the great reviews and the epic audience reaction to Citadel, I’m genuinely stunned and humbled. It’ll take a while for it all to sink in, but I’m so thankful to SXSW and I can’t think of a way that the festival could have gone any better!”
Blurring the boundary between real-life experiences and a darker fictional world, Citadel is an unsettling, original and powerful story – an agoraphobic father teams up with a renegade priest to save his daughter from the clutches of a gang of twisted feral children.
Variety has said that “Foy skillfully taps into primal fears and urban paranoia to keep his audience consistently unsettled” and also commented on the imagery in the final scenes describing them as “breathtakingly lyrical”.
