Dramas from Hispaniola dominated the jury and audience awards at the hybrid 39th Miami Film Festival as Géssica Généus’s Haiti-set Freda won the $25,000 Knight Marimbas Award and Jose Maria Cabral’s Dominican Republic production Parsley took the audience feature film award.
The festival, which ran both in-theater and virtual presentations and ran from March 4-13, gave special recognition through the Knight Marimbas jury to actor Haztin Navarrete from The Box and actress Mari Oliveira from Medusa.
A third Hispaniola drama, Carajita (DR-Arg) by Ulises Porra and Silvina Schnicer, was awarded the $10,000 HBO Ibero-American Feature Film Award sponsored by WarnerMedia.
The $55,000 Knight Made in MIA Film Award supported by the Knight Foundation is given to three films that have a substantial portion of their content in South Florida and best utilise their story and theme for universal resonance.
This year’s recipients were You Can Always Come Home by Juan Luis Matos for the $30,000 first prize, while the $15,000 second prize went to In Beauty It Is Unfinished by Greko Sklavounos and the $10,000 third prize was awarded to Marianna Serrano’s Un Pequeño Corte.
Robert Requejo Ramos’s South Florida-set South Beach Shark Club: Legends And Lore Of The South Florida Shark Hunters won the Documentary Achievement Award voted on by the audience. French-Egyptian drama You Resemble Me by Dina Amer received the $10,000 Jordan Ressler First Feature Award, while Zhang Yimou’s special presentation One Second won the Rene Rodriguez Critics Award selected by accredited film critics covering the Festival.
The returning $1,000 Florida Cinemaslam Student Film Award went to Chris Molina’s The Truth Of A Thousand Nights, directed by Chris Molina.
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