Premios Solé Tura Awards
The Brain Film Fest organizes and awards annually the Premi Solé Tura Awards, set up in 2009, for feature films and short films about the brain, aiming to raise awareness on the conditions of the brain and the social impact of its disorders, to promote audiovisual creation and to recall the figure of Jordi Solé Tura.
- Best Feature Film, endowed with an official award and €3.000,00
- Best Short Film, endowed with an official award and €1.500,00
- Audience Award, endowed with an official award.
Brain Film Fest Special Award
Established in 2022 on the occasion of the festival’s fifth anniversary, this honorary award is granted annually to a figure from the world of culture whose work and public reach have had a significant influence on the collective imagination around brain-related themes.
CARME ELIAS, actress (2022)
Winner of the Goya Award for Best Actress for Camino in 2009 and the Gaudí Honorary Award in 2021.
With a long and distinguished career in theatre and film, she has embodied powerful yet essential portrayals of the journey towards death and its acceptance as an integral part of life, the loss of memory and personal identity, and living with trauma.
During her acceptance speech, Carme Elías revealed her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, setting an example of transparency and a strong commitment to making the illness visible.
ISABEL COIXET, filmmaker (2023)
A multi-award-winning director and one of the leading international ambassadors of Spanish cinema, she received the Brain Film Fest Special Award in recognition of her cinematic career addressing themes of trauma and post-trauma.
In her own words: “My obsession with trauma and post-trauma came from a neurologist, Inge Genefke, who founded a rehabilitation centre for victims of torture and developed protocols to treat people after trauma, torture, injustice, etc. She has influenced many generations of documentary filmmakers, and for me, she has been a true inspiration.”
MAITE ALBERDI, filmmaker (2024)
Chilean documentary filmmaker Maite Alberdi received the award for the way in which, through her filmography, she explores old age and brain-related themes. With a singular, lucid and empathetic gaze, Alberdi has built a distinctive narrative around ageing, the mechanisms of memory and emotional resilience.
Alberdi has developed a unique style characterised by the intimate portrayal of small worlds. She has been nominated for an Academy Award on two occasions, with The Mole Agent (2020) and The Eternal Memory (2023), a film that places Alzheimer’s disease at the centre of its cinematic narrative through the loving relationship and caregiving bond between Augusto Góngora, a Chilean journalist key to the recovery of his country’s historical memory and now diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and his wife, Paulina Urrutia, actress and former Chilean Minister of Culture.
NICOLAS PHILIBERT, filmmaker (2025)
Philibert is one of the most outstanding filmmakers in observational documentary cinema, known for his subtle, respectful and deeply empathetic style, which conveys the reality of complex worlds without altering their essence. He has devoted his career to portraying the complexity of the human condition, offering a kind of cinema that invites understanding and reflection without prejudice.
The award particularly seeks to recognise his recent innovative trilogy on mental health: On the Adamant (2023), Averroes & Rosa Parks (2024) and The Typewriter and Other Headaches (2024). This series of works addresses in depth a subject that is often overlooked, doing so from a perspective that challenges stigma and places the dignity and humanity of people with mental illness and their caregivers at its core.
CARLA SIMÓN, filmmaker (2026)
Author of Summer 1993 (2017), Alcarràs (2022) and Romería (2025)—which together form a widely acclaimed autobiographical trilogy—the Special Award recognises a filmography deeply connected to memory, emotions, identity and family relationships, central themes in understanding the human condition and the functioning of the brain. According to the festival directors, Cristina Maragall, president of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, and filmmaker Albert Solé, Carla Simón’s work “has made a decisive contribution to shaping an intimate and honest collective imagination around memory, grief and family bonds, through a sensitive gaze that connects directly with the emotions and mental processes that define who we are”.
In 2020, Carla Simón received the National Culture Award, granted by the Consell Nacional de la Cultura i de les Arts (CoNCA), and in 2023 she was awarded the National Film Award by Spain’s Ministry of Culture.