Mexican directors Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s Sujo won the Grand Prix at this year’s Sofia International Film Festival (March 13-24).
The Mexican-French-US co-production about a boy who must fight against the temptation of local gangs premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize, and is being handled internationally by Alpha Violet.
The festival’s top prize has gone to a film from Mexico for the second year running after Carlos Eichelmann Kaiser’s Red Shoes won last year.
The international jury, presided over by Hungarian actor-writer-director Szabolcs Hadju and including outgoing EFM director Dennis Ruh, gave its special jury award to Romania’s Adi Voicu for his debut feature The Capture.
Shuchi Talat was named best director for her debut Girls Will Be Girls which had already won awards at Sundance and Berlin.
A special mention went to Japanese director Daichi Murase’s second feature Beyond The Fog which was produced by filmmaker Naomi Kawase with the help of Nara International Film Festival.
The Balkan Films competition was won by Greek filmmaker Christina Ioakeimidi’s second feature Medium.
The documentary jury headed by the Latvian-based filmmaker Vitaliy Manskiy presented the best documentary award to Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez for Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat, which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award at Sundance this January.
The audience award went to Bulgarian director Yana Lekarska’s Because I Love Bad Weather and the Fipresci jury prize to Hungarian debutant Adam Breier’s All About The Levkoviches.
Sofia Meetings
Projects from Bulgaria, Greece and Germany were among the winners from the 17 feature films pitched at Sofia’s parallel co-production market, Sofia Meetings, held March 20-24.
The Cinelab Romania award of postproduction services worth €15,000 went to Bulgarian filmmaker Petar Krumov’s coming-of-age tragicomedy Barefoot Bull which is aiming to go into production this autumn.
The Chaos VFX Award for postproduction services went to Greek director Gregoris Rentis and his producer Myrto Stathi of Athens-based BYRD for his fiction feature-length debut Sydney Smile Future Perfect.
The ‘Story Tricks’ Story Bundle Award went to German-Ukrainian writer-director Sergei Waldrat’s Baku-based drama Heartbeat - a co-production between Cologne-based Doghouse Filmproductions, Azerbaijan’s Mew Movies and Canada’s Quiet Revolution Pictures.
The Elbur Film Award, worth a combined €6,800 in cash and equipment, went to Portuguese-Angolan director Carlos Conceicao for his Angolan-based drama Report On The Miracles Of Earth.
The UNIQA award worth €1,000 went to Kristiyan Bozov’s debut feature Death Is For Living to be produced by Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov’s Abraxas Film.
The EWA BG award of industry accreditation to the Karlovy Vary Film Festival went to the team behind Polish director Grzegorz Jaroszuk’s third feature project The Miracle Number Three.
US producer Jim Stark, who has worked with Corneliu Porumboiu and Szabolcs Hadju, said of the event: “The funds here still remain prepared to do art movies without stars, without genre plots and lots of the things that some of the funders in Western Europe, and certainly in the US, are looking for.”
Projects previously pitched at the Sofia Meetings include Antonio Lukich’s Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Asif Rustamov’s Cold As Marble, Anna Jadowska’s Woman On The Roof, Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk’s Pamfir, and Tom Shoval’s Youth.
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