The Sense of Touch, Canuck Black win at 4th Be there! Corfu Animation Festival
The 4th Be there! Corfu Animation Festival took place from 16 to 19 October (Corfu Greece) and handed out its awards. The Grand Prix of the festival went to the French Folimage short The Sense of Touch (Le sens du toucher) by Jean-Charles Mbotti Malolo (France/Switzerland, 2014).
The jury committee, comprised by Michaela Pavlatova (Czech Republic), Eleni Mouri (Greece) και Zbigniew Czapla (Poland) awarded the film "for its brilliant, playful, complex touching story delivered with humor and elegance. A film about silence with a perfect music and sound and vibrations"
Chloé and Louis are secretly in love with each other. Every word is a move, every sentence is a choreography. Louis finally invites Chloé at his place for dinner, and let her in with kittens she found on the way, despite he is allergic to fur. Throughout the dinner, Louis's dark side starts to show.
The jury prize went to the US/Greek political allegory and thriller by Nassos Vakalis Dinner for Few (2014) for its being"a strong, bold political film with important message".
The best music for film award went to Ex animo (Poland 2014, dir. Wojciech Wojtkowski) and the composer Tomasz Jakub Opalka, for it depicted " the great power of imagination shown through the perfection connection of image and music". In the graduation film, UK won with Rebecca Archer and her detective bear story, Canuck Black (UK, 2014). The jury committee by Marc Jousset (French), Barbara Szczekała (Poland) and Marina Papasotiriou (Greece) awarded the film for "the good script, its coherent narrative, and the nice metaphor as far as the search for identity is concerned".
Another NFTS film ,the UK/Greek production My Stuffed Granny by Effie Pappa (UK/Greece, 2014) was awarded the Best Greek Graduation short, for "the interesting and non-judgmental way of coping with life and death, especially in contemporary Greece".
Special mention was given to Dinosaurs by Dao Thi Thuy Linh (Czech Republic, 2013) for "the creativity within its simplicity".
In the feature competitive section, the film Tito on Ice by Max Andersson and Helena Ahonen (Sweden/Germany, 2013) [read the review at Zippy Frames]. a road movie to ex-Yugoslavia and Titio via animation won the best feature film.
The jury applauded the "good combination of real images, animation and comics, a light commentary on hard history, and the creative eye of the director between reaity and fiction, the good combination of humour and emotion".
The 4th Be there! Corfu Animation Festival enjoyed a lot tributes, from the Czech auteur Michaela Pavlatova retrospective to the Persepolis producer Marc Jousset talk on European animation and the challenge of European animated production.
A collaboration and a programme exchange with IFF Etiuda & Anima also was on the agenda, as well as a tribute to LGBT issues "Over the Rainbow".
View all info at the official festival site.