With the highest award of the 43rd edition, Eliza Kubarska obtains the first grand prize of a successful career as a mountain film director that so far had led her to win four Silver Edelweiss in Torelló, including two awards for best mountain culture film for K2. Touching The Sky (2015) and The Wall Of Shadows (2020). Kubarska visited us to present The Last Expedition at the Festival. The climber and filmmaker reflected like this after learning that her film was this year's big winner: This award is very important to us, because my dream is to share, to spread the story of Wanda Rutkiewicz around the world. I think it's not just a story about her, but it's also a story about women in a world where they are not always accepted. Hopefully a story like hers will never be repeated again.

The documentary directed by Polish filmmaker and mountaineer Eliza Kubarska has been awarded the Gran Premi Vila de Torelló and Flor de Neu d’Or this year for its profound vision of one of the great legends of history, Wanda Rutkiewicz, who paved the way for elite mountaineering. The Jury has particularly valued the contribution of a great mountaineer to one of the best generations of Himalayan climbers in history, and the careful and sensitive way in which a complex personality is portrayed, with its contradictions, antagonisms and the misogyny that often accompanies elite mountaineering. It has also highlighted the work of recovering the audiovisual documentation that the Polish mountaineer self-recorded to bear witness to her thoughts and feelings, both in her public activity and in the most personal sphere.