Paraguayan director Paz Encina’s feature project Unique Time, about an elderly couple living in exile and awaiting news of their son who disappeared during Paraguay’s military dictatorship, won three major awards at the closing ceremony of the 22nd edition of Open Doors, the talent development programme of the Locarno Film Festival.
The co-production between Paraguay’s Sabaté Films, Mexico’s Piano and Germany’s Black Forest Films received one of the $23,000 (CHF 20,000) Open Doors grants as well as picking up the $6,600 Prix Arte Kino International for development and the Sørfond award which gives the project an opportunity to take part in the Norwegian pitching event this November.
A second $23,000 Open Doors grant went to El Salvadoran-born Ernesto Bautista’s debut feature Salvation.
In addition, two Open Doors grants worth $5,800 (CHF 5,000) and offered by the Open Doors initiative were handed out to feature debuts - Cuban director Rosa María Rodriguez’s Her Lightness and Peruvian filmmaker Fernando Luis Mendoza Salazar’s Return Of The Last Mochicha Warrior.
The $8.700 CNC development grant was presented to Ecuadorian Rob Mendoza’s queer science fiction feature UFOs In The Tropics, which also received the writing residency offered by Moulin d’Andé-CECI and the Locarno Film Festival.
In addition, several of Open Doors’ partners sponsored awards for participants across the programme’s three strands of the Projects Hub, Producers Lab and Directors Club.
One of this year’s Producers Lab participants, Cuban producer Yamila Marrero of Crisalida Producciones, received the Rotterdam Lab Award enabling her to attend the next edition of the Rotterdam Lab, while Salvation director Ernesto Bautista was presented with Brazil’s BR Lab Award offering him travel, accommodation and participation for this year’s BR Lab project development workshop in São Paulo in October.
The Organisation Internationale Francophonie (OIF) and Initiative Film’s Open Doors–OIF–ACP–EU award providing a script consultancy lasting up to 18 months was won by Dominican director-cinematographer Iván de Lara for his coming of age drama Farewell To Lola , while the Open Doors – World Cinema Fund audience strategy award was presented to the Peruvian project Return Of The Last Mochicha Warrior. The latter was described as “an adventure movie that merges the archaeological mystery genre with the high-tech world of gamers”.
Meanwhile, Honduran producer Luis Flores Alvarenga became the first recipient of the Tabakalera-San Sebastian Film Festival residency award.
Alvarenga was participating in Open Doors’ Producers Lab with feature project Los Ninos Perdidos to be directed by Enrique Medrano about three orphaned children who need to reconnect with their protective ancestors of the forest.
2024 was the third and final year of Open Doors’ cycle focused on the region of Latin America and the Caribbean. Eight projects in development were selected for the Projects Hub, along with eight creative producers who participated in the programme’s talent incubator, the Producers Lab, and the directors of films showing in the Open Doors Screenings as the Directors Club.
The next Open Doors cycle beginning next year will last for four years (instead of the previous three) and will be dedicated to filmmakers from Africa.
”This transition is about expanding our work,” explained Open Doors head Zsuzsi Bánkuti. “We plan to foster strong collaborations between Latin American, the Caribbean and the African continent, ensuring that the connections of the previous years continue while forming new ones.”
Locarno Residency winners
Berlin-based South African filmmaker Nolitha Refilwe Mkulisi, Indonesian artist and filmmaker Timotheus Anggawan Kusno and Italian director Enea Zucchetti have been selected for the Locarno Residency 2024. They will benefit from a one-year mentoring course of online and in-person sessions to develop feature projects they will then pitch at Locarno Pro 2025.
The three directors were among 10 filmmakers from around the world, including Palestinian writer-director Shadi Jamil Habib Allah and Berlin-based Chinese director and artist Viv Li, who had come to Locarno this past week to present their projects to the jury comprised of
Swiss writer-director Tizian Büchi, German producer Julia Cöllen of Fünferfilm, and French sales agent Virginie Devesa of Alpha Violet.
Meanwhile, the $5,800 grand prize of the 2023 Locarno Residency was awarded to the Swiss-based French filmmaker Coline Confort for her project Josie Goes To War . The other two finalists were Eliza Scanlen and Ana Elena Tejera.
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