This year’s jury of Gulya Sultanova, Juanma Carrillo and Michelle Hoekstra awarded
BEST FEATURE to MI ÚLTIMO ROUND, by Julio Jorquera (Chile, 2011),
and
BEST DOCUMENTARY to MI SEXUALIDAD ES UNA CREACIÓN ARTÍSTICA, directed by Lucía Egaña (España, 2011).
Zinegoak 2012 was the 9th edition of the glt film and performing arts festival, held in Bilbao.
Read the full list of winners (in Spanish), including the Audience Award prizes here.
Maguey, that’s what. An award at a straight festival to support and promote a different kind of film to the one their audiences are maybe used to. A queer one, in other words. Frameline, The Teddy Award, Lesgaicinemad and The Vancouver Queer Film Festival are all contributing programming, and there will also be a Derek Jarman homage.
The English information is a bit thin, but if you’re a Spanish speaker, there’s plenty of info at their website.
The Teddy Award, the oldest and most prestigious queer film award of them all (especially one associated with an A Festival), wound up with a bang on Friday the 17th of Feb for the 26th time. It’s grown to be a big deal over the years, from humble beginnings as a prize awarded by the few queer film festival programmers and filmmakers who used to meet at Berlinale back in the day to a televised awards show and the massive event that it is today.
If your German’s any good you can read the full press release with Jury statements here, but if not, then the winners can be summed up as:
BEST FEATURE FILM: KEEP THE LIGHTS ON, Ira Sachs’ semi-autobiographical feature, which premiered at Sundance this year.
BEST DOCUMENTARY: CALL ME KUCHU, which premiered at Berlinale.
BEST SHORT FILM: LOXORO
and the
SPECIAL JURY AWARD: JAURÈS
The 26th edition of the Brussels LGBT festival ended on the 11th of Feb with the following audience awards being announced:
Prix du Public Toute catégorie & Prix du public pour le meilleur film lesbien : 80 DAYS (Jon Garano and José Mari Goenaga)
Prix du Public pour le meilleur documentaire : Miwa, à la recherche du Lézard Noir (Pascal-Alex Vincent)
Prix du Public pour le meilleur Moyen Métrage : Mon Arbre (Bérénice André)
Prix du Public pour le meilleur long métrage Gay : Going down in la-la land (Casper Andreas)
Central Europe’s largest queer film festival awards prizes to the best queer films in three categories.
The international jury chaired by Tom Kalin awarded the best feature film prize to Bruce McDonald’s TRIGGER. Additionally, the jury were impressed by and gave honorable mentions to STADT, LAND, FLUSS (HARVEST) and WEEKEND.
The student jury awards the best short film – this year to TWO BEDS by Kanoko Wynkoop.
Unsurprisingly, the audience award went to this year’s favourite gay film, WEEKEND.
Read more, including the jury statements, here.
Since Madrid’s major queer film festival awards a huge list of prizes, I’m going to cheat and do a copy-paste here.
AUDIENCE AWARDS
• Best Feature Film: “You Should Meet My Son!” by Keith Hartman.
• Best Documentary: “365 Without 377” by Adele Tulli.
• Best Short Film: “Muy Mujer” by Luis Escobar.
• Best Spanish Film: “Muy Mujer” by Luis Escobar.
JURY AWARDS
DOCUMENTARY
• Best Documentary Short: Ex aequo for “XY: Anatomy of a Boy” of Mette Carla Albrechtsen. and “Vera, Lara (and Visas)” of Xiana García Freire.
• Best Documentary Director: Rachid B for “Le Ciel en Bataille”.
• Best Documentary Feature: “Le Ciel en Bataille”.
FICTION
• Best Screenplay: Paula Milne for “The Night Watch”.
• Best Actor: Roberto Farias and Hector Morales “My Last Round”.
• Best Actress: Anna Maxwell Martin for “The Night Watch”.
• Best Director: Andrew Haigh for “Weekend”.
• Best Feature Film – Leopoldo Alas Prize: “Weekend” by Andrew Haigh.
• Best Short Film: “The Colonel’s Outing” by Christopher Banks, “for its excellent photography, exceptional performance, freshness and warmth of the subject”.
• Best Animated Short Film: “Yulia” of Antoine Arditti, to show that the world is not only of the strong but also of the weak ones.
• Best Video Art “Treviano e la luna” of Clark Nikolai, by his daring, acid criticism and humor.
SPANISH SECTION
• Best Spanish Director: Maria Popova for “Vides transexualls.”
• Best Spanish Documentary: “Vides transexualls” Maria Popova.
• Best Spanish Short Film: “Sígueme” by Alejandro Duran, for the quality of the script, the understanding for an entire society but be decided in respect of individual freedom.
• Best Spanish Film: “Vides transexualls” Maria Popova.
The 17th edition of Chéries-Chéris — the Paris Gay, Lesbian, Trans and ++++ Festival wound up on Sunday the 16th of October. They have announced the following awards:
LONGS-METRAGES
Grand Prix Chéries-Chéris: Romeos de Sabine Bernardi.
Prix du jury: Sur le départ de Michaël Dacheux.
Prix d’interprétation (ex-aequo): Sarah Kazemy et Nikohl Boosheri, En secret.
COURTS-METRAGES
Grand Prix Chéries-Chéris: Le Genre qui doute de Julie Carlier.
Prix Pink TV du court métrage : Je ne veux pas rentrer seul de Daniel Ribeiro.
FILMS DOCUMENTAIRES
Grand Prix Chéries-Chéris: House of Shame – Chantal All Night Long de Johanna Jackie Baier.
Prix Pink TV du film documentaire: homo@lv de Kaspars Goba.
I noticed two new tweets in the last little while that made me start thinking about festival sponsorship and its ramifications. Firstly, the tweets, both from @TaliShapiro:
Communiqué from #Cineffable [bottom left] http://bit.ly/nVIzUu #French festival accepts #Israeli grant, but takes down embassy logos.
#QueerLisboa drops #Israeli sponsorship following #boycott campaign http://bit.ly/nDrSQk #BDS
Sponsorship is hard to come by; one could argue that it can be harder for queer film festivals to snag corporate money than other cultural events. Because of this, over the years, many festivals have managed to build relationships with Embassies and Consulates and cultural bodies to receive financial or in-kind support. The Goethe Institute is very often ‘a sure bet’ to help festivals bring German filmmakers to festivals as guests, for example.
Compared to this, an Israeli government grant can be super-controversial, not only at the International Film Festival level (cf 2010 at TIFF) but also at the QFF level. The community — the festivalgoers that support the festival — might have very strong opinions about what they see as an implicit acceptance of the political situation in Israel.
Panteras Rosa, Portugal’s queer rights group, demonstrated in 2010 against Israeli financial support at the Queer Lisboa’s opening night. This year, they claimed ‘victory’ — that their pressure resulted in the festival ‘dropping the support’. (their statement)
However, when I asked the festival for their side of the story I got a different version of events:
Queer Lisboa has taken no official position regarding the BDS call for boycott, so the statements given by Panteras Rosa are untrue. These statements are regrettable since they speak in name of the Festival, having never asked the Festival for an official statement on the fact that this year we do not have a sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy. Again, we state that the Festival will not take a political position on this matter.
It can cost a lot of money to run a film festival, and some things just can’t be done for free — shipping, venue hire, film rental, etc. And ticket sales are great, but it takes more than that to balance the books. Government funding is shrinking, and sponsorship that doesn’t have (unwanted) strings attached and is from ‘ethically correct’ sources is a small pot indeed.
So what’s a festival to do? Of course there’s no easy answer. But I think at the very least a festival should be allowed to decide internally what their position is and whether they want to make that public, instead of being hijacked for someone else’s cause.
The Iris Prize, which is a weekend-long festival that takes place in Cardiff, Wales, is one of the more unusual festivals that takes place on the European calendar. There’s actually no other festival like it in the world. It offers an extremely attractive and generous prize – production support to the tune of £25,000 (read more). The winning filmmaker has to use this support to complete their film in time for it to be presented at the following year’s festival.
The festival closed on the 8th of October, and the winning film has been announced. Unsurprisingly (the film’s been winning prizes all over the world), the jury chose I DON’T WANT TO GO BACK ALONE by Daniel Ribeiro from Brazil.
Best UK short went to THE RED BIKE by Andrew Steggall.
After the festival’s inaugural year (2007) the organizers broadened the scope of films available (and added a few more prizes) to include feature films. It remains, however, very focussed on the short film, and is therefore one of the few festivals where the feature-length selections take a bit more of a back seat. The full list of winners can be seen here.
Skeive Filmer wrapped on the 21st of September and announced the following winners before the closing film.
The Jury Award for Best Short Film: I DON’T WANT TO GO BACK ALONE by Daniel Ribeiro, with an Honorable Mention to ANTI-REPRODUCTIVE MATING RITUAL by Vebjørn Guttormsgaard Møllberg.
In the category Best Feature/Documentary:
An honorable mention went to Daishi Matsunaga for PYUUPIRU, and finally the award for Best Feature/Documentary went to Andrew Haigh’s magnificent film WEEKEND.
Jury statements are online here.
