Last year, the big face-off was between Control and Unrelated, with the latter squeezing home by a whisker. This time around, the Guardian First Film award promised to be considerably more open. The judging panel consisted of four Guardian film writers – Peter Bradshaw, Catherine Shoard, Xan Brooks and me – plus Unrelated's director, Joanna Hogg, as the external voice. The first round of voting had seen early support for Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York and Neill Blomkamp's District 9, but how would it go down in the judging room?
If we were to end up with one winner, we quickly we realised we had to be cruel; all 10 shortlisted films were great in some way, but we had to mercilessly seize on any weakness. So in the end, two films emerged as front runners. Katalin Varga, a noirish fable of vengeance shot in Hungary by British director Peter Strickland had lots of support – "I loved this, it had a wonderful strangeness," said Brooks – as did Sleep Furiously, Gideon Koppel's documentary essay shot in a small Welsh village ("a beautiful poem", according to Hogg). After a couple of voting rounds, it was Sleep Furiously that came out on top.
Congratulations are due, then, to Koppel, who made the film at the age of 48 after a career navigating what you would assume are the two entirely separate worlds of academia and commercials. In the late 1980s, he enrolled in a mixed-media postgraduate course at the Slade, and currently teaches an MA in documentary at Royal Holloway. At the same time, he has maintained a career working in advertising and fashion; one of his commercials, the NSPCC's Open Your Eyes (bit.ly/aMawnK), according to Koppel, holds the record for money-raising. He is as aware as anyone of these contradictions, discoursing one moment on the cinematic language required to shoot a dishwasher commercial, then admitting the difficulties he faced in making the compromises advertising required ("I was hopeless at the politics of it all").
Sleep Furiously's path was as tortuous as we have come to expect for any low-budget British film. Koppel initially found some interest at the UK Film Council, which gave him £10,000 to shoot a "pilot"; he hired the village school that features in the finished film and used it as a studio, inviting all the villagers "to present themselves in some way before the camera". But the resulting stylised, Richard Avedon-influenced backgrounds were, as Koppel readily admits, the "antithesis of Sleep Furiously". The Film Council decided not to invest any further, but Koppel bears no bitterness: any institution attempting to support the creative arts, he says, is in "an impossible position". Fortunately, another state funder, the Film Agency for Wales, stepped in, and the film got off the ground.
Koppel says he was adamant about shooting on film, admiring the medium's "painterly quality", and its ability to create images "my imagination can fall into". Once completed, though, it was still a massive struggle. His main festival hope, Berlin, rejected the film – especially upsetting, you feel, as Koppel's painter father Heinz was an emigre forced out of Germany before the war. Eventually, though, it was accepted by Edinburgh and began a slow climb to its present status. "It still hasn't been booked for Welsh television," he says pointedly.
But there's no doubt that winning an award or two has a bracing effect. "It's wonderful. I've never won prizes in my life before. I'm a serial loser when it comes to awards, so it's kind of a shock." Koppel's wistful, elegaic treatment of village life is a thoroughly deserving winner – but would it have got there, you have to wonder, if Koppel had gone with his original idea for the film's ending. "At one point we planned to blow up the library van." Thank goodness he changed his mind.
