Rei and The Old Bachelor take top IFFR 2024 awards
Winners of the 2024 Tiger Award and VPRO Big Screen Award announced.
International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) announces the 2024 winners from its two feature competitions: the Tiger Competition and the Big Screen Competition. The prizes were handed out during the IFFR Awards Ceremony on Friday 2 February, along with the FIPRESCI, NETPAC and Youth Jury awards.
IFFR Competition winners 2024
Tiger Competition
IFFR’s trademark Tiger Competition celebrates the innovative and adventurous spirit of up-and-coming filmmakers. From the 14 titles presented in the 2024 edition, the jury granted three prizes: the Tiger Award, worth €40,000, and two Special Jury Awards, worth €10,000 each.
Rei (Japan) by Tanaka Toshihiko wins the Tiger Award 2024.
The jury stated: “The jury decided to give the Tiger Award to a burgeoning film director who chose to develop his debut film in a loose and unbounded environment. His strength relies on a collaborative environment centred on the actors, an attention to the power of recitation – and, perhaps most importantly, a taste for performative sequences that operate as discrete units within the overall structure, but which typically resist acting as the power of the different chosen locations slowly emerges. The film’s ending suggests that people dwell in constant threat from the outside world. But they might yet live, together.”
Kiss Wagon (India) by Midhun Murali wins a Special Jury Award.
The jury stated: “Hypnotic – bewildering – heart-racing. A trip on a speed train where our solitudes are mouth to mouth reanimated. The first special jury award goes to a weirdly beautiful and beautifully weird film.”
Flathead (Australia) by Jaydon Martin wins a Special Jury Award.
The jury stated: “This film addresses the people who contributed to society, keep society going and rolling, but not given enough attention and care. The images are powerful and convincing. The cast, in particular the old man, is exceptionally impressive. The execution is calm but touching. The second jury award goes to a film that is a naturalistic and realistic film at its best.”
The Tiger Competition Jury consisted of Marco Müller, Ena Sendijarević, Nadia Turincev, Billy Woodberry, and Herman Yau.
Big Screen Competition
The Big Screen Competition presented a selection of 12 titles at IFFR 2024, bridging the gap between popular, classic and arthouse cinema. A jury of film lovers decided the winner of the VPRO Big Screen Award. The winning film receives a guaranteed theatrical release in the Netherlands and will be broadcast on Dutch TV by VPRO and NPO. The award is accompanied by a €30,000 prize, shared equally between the filmmaker and the distributor who will release the film.
The Old Bachelor (Iran) by Oktay Baraheni wins the VPRO Big Screen Award 2024.
The jury stated: “Gripping from start to finish, this film left a strong impression on the jury long after it had ended. Exploring powerful themes of patriarchy, misogyny, love, violence and tragedy, this film is a masterclass in storytelling, through its gripping, nuanced dialogue, exquisite attention to detail and its development of tension, which simmers throughout the film until it reaches boiling point in the final, explosive act. It is a deeply visceral cinematic experience that takes you captive along with its characters as their world encloses around them. We are sure that the viewers will appreciate the powerful performances from the central cast, who so captivatingly portray a family at breaking point.”
FIPRESCI Award
A jury of international film journalists from the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique awarded the FIPRESCI Award to their standout Tiger Competition title.
The FIPRESCI Award 2024 goes to Kiss Wagon (India) by Midhun Murali.
The jury stated: “We decided to unanimously award a film that astounded us with its epic superhero storytelling and its bold defying of cinematic conventions. With its intricate collage of styles, genres, and themes, and elaborate, artisanal, very personal craft, it reminded us that cinema is a limitless space for play and invention, which constantly renews itself. We would like to celebrate its sheer spunk and freshness in approaching the grave issue of lack of liberties and of sexual and gender repression in a manner that combines humour, spectacle and intrigue.”
The jury was Ela Bittencourt, Dārta Ceriņa, Panagiotis Kotzathanasis, Antonios Lagarias and Ronald Rovers.
Red Sea is back, at its second edition, bold, cinematic, progressive, in the ancient city of Jeddah.
The festival opens with Shekhar Kapur’s romantic comedy What’s Love Got To Do With It?, while Oliver Stone presides over the Red Sea competition, which has 16 films in the running for the Yusr Awards. These include Iraqi director Ahmed Yassin Al-Daradji’s Hanging Gardens and Syrian director Soudade Kaadan’s Nezouh.
Guy Ritchie is receiving an honorary award, while in-conversation speakers include filmmakers Fatih Akin, Gurinder Chadha and Egyptian stars Mona Zaki and Hussein Fahmy. There will be gala screenings of awards season films including Broker, Decision To Leave, Empire Of Light and The Banshees Of Inisherin.
But the key focus of RSIFF is Arab and African cinema. Seven new Saudi features are set to world premiere. These include closing film Valley Road by Khalid Fahad, about a young man perceived as having a disability, which is set in a beautiful mountain village. Likewise, Saudi filmmaker Mohammed Alatawi’s directing debut, the desert-set historical drama Within Sand, makes its world premiere.
Both are filmed in areas of Saudi Arabia that have rarely been seen on the big screen but have opened up with the country’s reforms.
The second edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival will screen the best of the Arab and international cinema in Jeddah. Alongside the Festival will also showcase a retrospective program to celebrate the masters of cinema. The Festival is a platform for Arab filmmakers and industry professionals from around the world to connect, host competitions for short and feature films, and organize masterclasses to support emerging talent. The Red Sea International Film Festival will take place from December 1 — 10, 2022.
Red Sea Film Festival 2022
Helvetica Light is an easy-to-read font, witMemoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul n almost every site.
Watching an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film is like being in a gentle, ghostly dream. One of the most original and promising new voices to hit the international cinema scene in recent years. After winning the Palme D’Or in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, about a dying man and his encounters with ghosts, he returns to Cannes this year with Memoria, an unconventional, impressionistic film, mixing the living and the dead, the past, and the present, the terrestrial and the alien.
While Uncle Boonmee was filmed in the jungles of Thailand, Memoria transports us to the wilds of Colombia where Tilda Swinton plays Jessica, a market gardener who travels from Medellin to Bogota to visit her sister Karen, hospitalized by a mysterious respiratory disease. One night, Jessica is awoken from a sleep by a strange banging sound, a sound that only Jessica can hear. It appears to be a premonition of some change in the world, or perhaps it has something to do with the ancient bones dug up in the city, or maybe just the start of a nervous breakdown.
Apichatpong awakens political memories, traces that persist in the present. These are memories of victims of authoritarian regimes, victims who belongs to any persecuted group, from Thailand, or China, or Colombia. They are victims of today, and yesterday. In an interview, Apichatpong, who is soft-spoken even when outspoken, revealed he was worried about the power of the military in Thailand, the government’s censorship campaigns after the May crackdown and the “frustration and anger” of young people in the countryside who lack opportunities. “I hope it’s not too pessimistic to say that we are living on a time bomb,” he said. “Many people say that if you have money, you should put it in Swiss bank accounts. Or buy gold. It shows that people feel that they live in uncertain times.”
This striking enigmatic, uplifting, fluid, pleasingly assertive film is certain to be a hot contender for this year’s Palme D’Or.
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2021 Cannes Film Festival
El Gouna Film Festival Awards
Teemu Nikki’The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic won the Golden Star for best film at the 5th El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt,The award carries a cash prize of $50,000.
The film’s lead Petri Poikolainen won best actor, while Maya Vanderbeque, the young star of Playground won best actress.
Egyptian filmmaker Omar El Zohairy’s Cannes winner Feathers, won the prize for best Arab narrative film.
Directors Aleksey Chupov and Natasha Merkulova’s Captain Volkonogov Escaped won the Netpac award and Bronze Star in the narrative category.
Michel Franco’s Sundown won silver and in the narrative competition, while Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s Once Upon a Time in Calcutta earned a special mention from Netpac.