Four IFB Projects Among the Winners at Kerry Film Festival
Good news for four IFB-funded projects which all took home prizes at the Kerry Film Festival which took place from 30th October - 6th November. Anna Rodger's If These Walls Could Talk won Best Documentary Short, The Polish Langauge, directed by Alice Lyons and Orla McHardy scooped Best Animated Short, Runners, directed by Rob and Ronan Burke picked up the Best Short Award while the Children's Audience Award went to James Cotter's The End Is Night.
If These Walls Could Talk takes a look at the closed units of Irish psychiatric institutions as they approach their demise and stories of the people who spent the best part of their lives committed in them. The haunting film was produced by Siobhán Ward for Yellow Asylum Films through the IFB Reality Bites scheme.
The jury described it as "most inventive in its use of the documentary form and showed a real sense of cinema in its camera movement and compositions. It also maintained an intense and unsettling atmosphere. Its content was simple and powerful. We listened to the fragmented recollections of troubled minds as we beheld the crumbling ruins of an institution which, mercifully, belongs to a different era and a different way of thinking."
Short films Bye, Bye Now, directed by Ross Whittaker and Aideen O'Sullivan and Ken Wardrop's The Herd, also received a Special Mention from the jury in the same category.
The Polish Language is a film-poem about the subversive force of art and the renewal of poetry in the whispery language of Polish. No stranger to awards, the film previously won Best Animation at the Galway Film Fleadh as well as a Best Animation IFTA nomination and has been officially selected to screen at numerous renowned festivals such as the Darklight Festival in Dublin, Animated Dreams Film Festival in Estonia, Short Film Festival Clermont Ferrand in France, SXSW Festival in Texas and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Produced by Steve Woods for Cel' Division, the animation was funded through the Frameworks scheme which is co-financed by the IFB, RTÉ and the Arts Council.
Presenting the Best Animated Short award, the jury commented on the film "...It's always surprising, inventive and technically virtuoso use of a wide array of animation techniques that added a dimension of visual poetry to the written poem. It also expands our understanding of the Polish culture and its people's history as much as the language itself".
Runners, which stars Aidan Gillen (The Wire) and Mark Butler (Song For A Raggy Boy), following eighteen year old Derek, who is finding it increasingly difficult to juggle his ‘career' as a drugs runner while also maintaining a relationship and a family. Written by Pierce Ryan and produced by John Wallace for Black Sheep Productions through the Signatures scheme, it was selected as a finalist at the Producers Guild of America's "Producers Challenge" in L.A earlier this year and is set to screen on RTÉ1 later this month.
Humorous short film The End Is Night, about a farmer who discovers an ancient amulet with the power to destroy the world, he does what any of us would do! Produced by Cormac Fox for Vico Films with funding from the Short Shorts scheme, the project picked up the Children's Audience Award at the festival.
The Kerry Film Festival, which is celebrating eleven years of bringing film to Kerry, announced the winning films from the 2010 edition of the festival. Dave Fanning was MC at the Awards Ceremony, which took place at 2:00 pm in Siamsa Tire in Tralee on Saturday, November 6th.
The Award Ceremony was the culmination of a week of films at Kerry Film Festival, which began on Saturday, October 30th. The winning films were selected by Kerry Film Festival's adjudication panel which included Noel Pearson, Jane Seymour, Tomm Moore and James Marsh and by the audience at the festival. Over five hundred and fifty films were submitted to the 2010 Kerry Film Festival with 92 short films screening in total.