Planet of Snail wins top prize at IDFA

The 24th International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) has awarded its top prize, the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, to Seung-Jun Yi’s Planet of Snail from South Korea.

Planet of Snail, which had been pitched at the IDFA Forum in 2010, wins a cash prize of €12,500. The film is about the daily life of a deaf and blind man, Young-Chan, and his loving wife Soon-Ho.

Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 Broken Cameras from Palestine/Israel was given a special jury award, and the film also won the Publieke Omroep IDFA Audience Award. That film is a personal portrait of a Palestinian village resisting Jewish settlements encroaching on their lands.

The festival runs until Sunday, but visitors are expected to reach more than 200,000, up from 180,000 in 2010. Net takings will be over €1m.

The other IDFA prizes are:

NTR IDFA Award for Best Mid-Length Documentary (€ 10,000)
Montenegro by Jorge Gaggero (Argentina)

IDFA Award for First Appearance (€ 5,000)
The Vanishing Spring Light by Xun Yu (China/Canada)

Dioraphte IDFA Award for Dutch Documentary (€ 5,000)
900 Days by Jessica Gorter

IDFA Award for Student Documentary (€ 2,500)
The Betrayal by Karen Winther (UK/Norway)

BlackBerry IDFA DOC U Award (€1,500)
The Last Days of Winter by Mehrdad Oskouei (Iran)

IDFA Award for Best Green Screen Documentary (€ 2,500) and Oxfam Global Justice Award
Bitter Seeds by Micha X. Peled (US/India)

IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling (€ 2,500)
Insitu by Antoine Viviani (France)

IDFA PLAY Award for Best Music Documentary
Last Days Here by Don Argott and Demian Fenton (US)

The number of Dutch and international guests increased in relation to 2010: to 2,670 from 2,477.   

Some 5,200 school students from primary and secondary schools visited the schools’ screenings during the past week.