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"Thank you for the great honour of recognising that I too am a f*****g whore - and I am very very proud of it." Not quite as many acceptance speeches for prizes start that way as they should perhaps - but that was how Helen Mirren began her thanks for her award for European Achievement in World Cinema at the grandiloquent 25th European Film Awards, in Malta on Saturday night.

But she was, it soon became clear, alluding to a celebrated proclamation made by the great Jeanne Moreau, then nearing 80, at the same awards back in 2007: "We are the f*****g wonderful whores of European cinema."

Mirren, glamorous in black and gold, paid tribute to a long list of the great FWW's of cinema who had inspired her at the start of her career: "Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Claudia Cardinale, LIv Ullmann, Hanna Schygulla, Melina Mercouri, Irene Papas and for me the greatest of all Anna Magnani - those to me were the actresses that I looked up to and and wanted to be like - I wanted to be an actress like them and I wanted to be a woman like them."

The European Film Awards, created to counterbalance Hollywood and the Oscars, aren't quite like any other prizes. Held each year in a different European city, they have a matey air and an openly polemical purpose - to assert not just the vitality of film but of European culture altogether and its historical primacy.

In Valletta, Malta's ancient and grand but quite tiny capital, that's easy. History makes itself felt at every turn. The awards ceremony was held in the splendid surroundings of the vast 16th century hospital, the Sacra Infermia, the largest in the world in its day, created by the Knights of the Order of St John, to receive 1,000 patients at a time - serving now, for a similarly sized get together of committed Euro-cineastes, also in need of succour.

EFA President Wim Wenders admitted Europe is in a crisis of identity. "We have a lot to offer in that calamity", he maintained. "Film is the ideal language, the best medicine, for rebuilding an identity." Throughout the prizes, clips were shown of actors and directors urgently proclaiming the salvational importance of "Mission Cinema". Lord Puttnam even said, a little broadly: "We're an endangered species, human beings." Distributors were repeatedly blamed for the low profile of European cinema. The Turkish-German director Fatih Akin suggested attendance at European films ccould be made compulsory: "I would force audiences to see certain stuff, definitely". He didn't say how, though. Batons?

British films did best in the technical categories. Maria Djurkovic won European Production Designer for her work on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Sean Bobbit won European Cinematographer and Joe Walker European Editor, both for their work on Steve McQueen's sex addiction movie, Shame.

The great Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, 72, graciously received a Lifetime Achievement Award, coming on stage in a wheelchair and whopping hat. But the evening belonged entirely to Amour, the formally perfect, emotionally ravaging film about the descent into sickness and death of an elderly loving couple, made by the austere master of European cinema, the Austrian director Michael Haneke, in France.

First, Haneke won European Director. Then, Jean-Louis Trintingnant, soon to turn 82, won European Actor for his portrayal of the husband, Georges and Emmanuelle Riva, 85, won European Actress (neither were able to be present, sadly). It was then nothing less than necessary that Amour should itself be hailed European Film. This year, there's no contest.

Haneke, wispily thin, white-haired, dressed as always entirely in inky black, is courteous but completely unyielding in such public situations. Asked at the press conference afterwards, what film he was working on next, he said: "You can't sell the skin of the bear before he is shot". In German.

He was also asked if he thought Amour might suffer at the Oscars for being considered an "art film". "He doesn't think about it and he has no idea", his translator swiftly explained. "It's not my problem", Haneke added quietly in English. But the way he rolled his head and eyes, at the very mention of the O-word, couldn't have been more eloquent. The evening summarised in a single expresssion.