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Malaysian drama Snow In Midsummer and Danish feature Sons have won the top prizes at the Hong Kong International Film Festival’s (Hkiff) Firebird Awards.

Snow In Midsummer, directed by Chong Keat-aun, won the Firebird Award for best film in the Chinese-language Young Cinema Competition. The film, which premiered in Venice’s Giornate Degli Autori section last September, revisits the tragic race riots that occurred in Kuala Lumpur on May 13, 1969.

Gustav Moller’s Sons won the top Firebird Award in the World category. The Denmark-Sweden co-production, about a prison officer who is faced with a dilemma when a young man...

Ivo (Minna Wündrich) spends her days tending to terminally ill patients. In her capacity as a palliative care nurse, she’s not responsible for saving them — that’s the doctors’ concern — though this 40-ish single mother does her best to listen to their complaints and ease their pain. It can be a draining experience, both physically and emotionally, and Ivo sometimes bends the rules in ways that make her at once more relatable and less saintly than her job might suggest.

With “Ivo,” writer-director Eva Trobisch doesn’t dwell on the morality of her title character’s choices, focusing more on the tension between this woman’s optimism and the weight of her work. Trobisch’s tough, observational drama builds on the promise of her 2018 debut, “All Is Good,” about a young woman determined not to let a sexual assault derail her life. Here, the German filmmaker delivers another stripped-down,...

Paris-based Loco Films has taken on international sales for Eva Trobisch’s Ivo ahead of the film’s world premiere in Berlin’s Encounters section.

The German filmmaker’s second feature is a drama about tough end-of-life decisions told through the story of a palliative home-care nurse. It follows the titular Ivo who spends her time caring for many different kinds of patients and families as they face the end of their lives.

The German-language film is produced by Studio Zentral/Network Movie’s Lucas Schmidt, Wolfgang Cimera and Lasse Scharpen and co-produced by Trima Films.

It stars Minna Wündrich,...