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20.1.2025

Baltasar Kormákur's TOUCH wins the Tromsø Audience Award

The winner of the Tromsø Audience Award 2025 is Touch by Baltasar Kormákur. The film was part of the Films from the North-program at the festival.

Touch tells the story of Kristófer, a retired seventy-year-old widower. He embarks on a journey after the global pandemic has struck, hoping to find out what happened to his girlfriend who disappeared without a trace 50 years earlier. His journey takes him across half the globe, all the way to Japan.

This is the second time Kormákur wins the Tromsø Audience Award, the first being in 2003 for his film The Sea.

„Baltasar Kormákur is a master storyteller, and here he has created yet another exquisite film. Touch is a beautiful love story that I can easily understand has won the hearts of our audience,“ says Program Director for Films from the North Astrid Aure.

„It is exciting that Kormákur wins the audience award for the second time, and there is no doubt that Icelandic films are very popular at TIFF. We know a lot of our audience is looking for the Icelandic films in the program each year, and some even try to specifically watch all of the films from Iceland at the festival,“ says Festival Director Lisa Hoen.

Touch is the fifth Icelandic film that wins the Tromsø Audience Award, and Kormákur is one of two Icelandic filmmakers that has won the award twice, the other being Benedikt Erlingsson for Woman at War (2019) and Of Horses and Men (2014).