Abdolreza Kahani’s Mortician Wins Top Prize At Edinburgh Film Festival

2025 Edinburgh Film Festival concludes tonight for another year and the festival announces it’s competition winners.  Abdolreza Kahani’s Mortician and Joanna Vymeris’s Mother Goose tonight’s big winners, prize for feature filmmaking and its prize for short filmmaking.

The awards were presented at a special ceremony at Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh by Jason Connery on behalf of The Connery Foundation and by legendary film editor Thelma Schoonmaker.

The winner of this year’s The Sean Connery Prize for Feature Filmmaking Excellence, decided on by an audience vote and funded by The Connery Foundation. Ten feature-length World Premieres were presented at Edinburgh Film Festival as part of the competition with the winning filmmaker being awarded £50,000 to support their future projects.

In Mortician, a reclusive mortician faces an unusual request from a dissident singer in hiding, their bond providing the beating heart of this disarmingly elegant film. Combining a distinctive, lo-fi visual style, naturalistic performances and familiar wit and humanity, Director Abdolreza Kahani’s film is both utterly distinctive and affecting.

Related Post: Our 2025 Edinburgh Film Festival Coverage

The winner of The Thelma Schoonmaker Prize for Short Filmmaking Excellence Competition is Joanna Vymeris’s Mother Goose. The short film competition winner was also decided on by an audience vote and is awarded £15,000 to support their future projects.

After the death of her husband, Janet decides to distract herself by rearing a goose, which is to be the centrepiece of her Christmas dinner. However, as she grows ever more isolated from her daughter, Janet’s need to nurture the goose becomes an obsession: one which will cost her dearly. A modern day Grimm’s fairy-tale about grief, isolation and a goose.

Festival Director, Paul Ridd has commented on the winners “As the 2025 Edinburgh International Film Festival draws to a close I am once again moved and humbled by the hard work and astonishing effort that everyone has put into making this Festival stimulating, entertaining and fun. I am so grateful to all the organisations, teams and individuals who put their hearts and souls into this. These past seven days are testament to our collective belief in the power of film to provoke, to stimulate and to inspire empathy. Our two competition winners showcase outstanding work from their respective filmmakers and teams, proving that with formal dexterity, humanity and grace, cinema is alive and kicking. I am hugely inspired by all the filmmakers in Competition and beyond as well as all our special guests, who have worked so brilliantly with us to platform their work on the big screen and have been so generous with their time with audiences and with industry who we know very well are hungry for something fresh and exciting. I cannot wait for 2026.”