The Adelaide Film Festival has crowned its 2026 winners. Glam Adelaide reports the Official Competition Jury awarded the Feature Fiction Award to South African filmmaker John Trengove's The Smell of Apples, while Dublin-based artist and filmmaker Dragana Jurišić's The Balkan Cowboy took the Feature Documentary Award. Each film received a $10,000 prize. The Smell of Apples, adapted from Mark Behr's acclaimed novel, is set in apartheid-era South Africa and follows 11-year-old Marnus, whose idyllic childhood unravels as he confronts the violence and inequality surrounding his privileged family. Trengove's debut The Wound (2017) premiered at Sundance and Berlin and was shortlisted for the foreign-language Oscar. IF Magazine notes the jury praised The Balkan Cowboy for taking "an inventive, long-view approach to the wounds of history," describing it as "archival, innovative, and often unexpectedly funny." Special Mentions went to Aung Phyoe's Fruit Gathering — about a forbidden love in a Myanmar textile factory — in fiction, and Afsaneh Salari's Tehran, Under the Skin in documentary, per Glam Adelaide. The jury comprised TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, actor Xavier Samuel, filmmaker-academic Sandeep Ray, Tilda Cobham-Hervey and producer Anna Vincent. The festival, which runs until October 25, also unveiled a Best of the Fest encore program from October 26, including opening-night film Wild Horse Nine and closing-night film Hell Has No Fire Escape. The jury's choices reflect the festival's growing international stature. Chaired in spirit by the presence of TIFF chief Cameron Bailey, the panel weighed films from South Africa, Ireland, Myanmar and Iran — a genuinely global shortlist for an Australian festival. Trengove, whose The Wound was shortlisted for the foreign-language Oscar, now adds an Adelaide prize to a career built on formally daring, morally complex cinema. With the festival's encore program extending the celebration to October 26, Adelaide's moment in the awards-season sun is well earned.
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