Martinique International Film Festival
2017 Fall Edition

Narrative Short Film & Martinique Snake Award: Gretchen at the spinning wheel (Austria) by Magdalena Chmielewska. What is pure imagination and what reality? Magdalena Chmielewska’s dream-like portrayals Gretchen’s spinning and brooding in her love to Faust make it nearly impossible to differentiate. Her love is a constant toing and froing between pure passion and panic desperation, between slowing down and accelerating – the principle upon which Schubert’s masterpiece rests. Made under the auspices of Michael Haneke at the National Film and TV School in Vienna Filmakademie Wien.

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Best Narrative Feature Film: Pa'am hai'ta yalda (Israel) by Natalie Kaplan. NOA has unconventional relationships with her doctor, with her neighbor and with a young soldier. Sleepless, she wanders around, trying to find her place in the world, willing to do anything to get some warm attention.

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Best Documentary Feature Film: The Orphanage (France) by Haag Matthieu. Grandson of a Slovakian immigrant who came to France on foot, I don’t feel at home anywhere . Whilst wandering in Vietnam I met Monsieur Vu Tiên, a foster father to many, who entrusted me with his life-story even though I could not speak his language. There started a journey of discovery about my place as a man and as a father through encounters and revelations.

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Best Documentary Short Film: The Crossing (UK) by Shreepali Patel. This emotionally charged multi-screen digital installation investigates the exploitation of hope and the black market economy of human trafficking. The Crossing explores the story of a young girl sex trafficked into an organised industry through the ‘lover boy’ technique. Her story unfolds through four interconnected screens with perspective shifting visuals and an intimate binaural sound design. The project itself sits within an increasingly complex climate of hardening public opinion; moral self-questioning and a $150 billion dollar world trade in people. As such the film takes as its starting point the concept of ‘hope’ and its gradual unfurling reality into an exploitation of trust to perpetuate a violent and organised industry trading in 21 million people, a third of which are children. The result is an intense, exploration of the destructive consequences of human trafficking through a heightened audio-visual experience. Defined as ‘adding an amazing piece of work to this battle against the worst of crimes’, The Crossing has been described as ‘ambitious and deftly executed’ and a project ‘that pushes the boundaries of film and communication’.

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Best Animated Short Film: Blue Light (UK) by Harriet Francis Croucher. Emergency service personnel talk about the realities of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and its impact on their lives and their families.

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Best Experimental Film: Litost (USA) by Rachel Silveria. Litost is a film about a young man perturbed by the strange goings on outside his home. He soon realizes all was not as it seemed and seeks to learn more about the source of his former plight, only to discover it was much ado about nothing - or was it?

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Best Caribbean & Latin American Cinema Now: Interference (Colombia) by Gabriel Muelle. She just can't get over her husband's death. She doesn't know how to keep on going, where to start. Until he decides to give her a hand.

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