After more than four hours of intense public debate, the Jury of the Lanzarote Film Showcase has unanimously selected 'The Conference of the Birds' as the best film in the official section of the 15th edition. The award was accepted by its director, Amin Motallebzadehm, who has been present in Lanzarote this week for the screenings. The award is a ceramic piece from the Juan Brito Foundation.
Lucía Salas (juror) Violeta Kovacsics (juror) Buski Cuberlo (co-founder of the Exhibition) Antonio Martín (juror) Amin Motallebzadeh (winner), Elena Azzedín (educational program and translator) Javier Fuentes Feo (director of the Exhibition)
The jury awarded him the highest prize because "in a moment of literal affirmations, he presents himself as an enigma, suggestive and sensual. He takes football as a framework to settle into a state of mind and a void, in the fascinating interstices of language, and to reveal the spaces that are not seen: between the word and what is, between one language and another".
‘The Shards’ has received a special mention for “making visible what is not seen in a moment of extreme visibility. For responding to the question of what a nation is with an intelligent, fragmentary, decentered, dislocated construction, like a dance facing the end of the world and, above all, for building a subjectivity that tirelessly seeks the collective, creating a new ‘us’ for a harsh world that can stop to recount what it means to live and die today”.
Young Jury and Crossroads
For their part, the members of the Young Jury have designated ‘With Hasan in Gaza’ as the best film for “its defense of images as an exercise in resistance and against oblivion. And for its different way of presenting the tragedy, and for having been able to give meaning, through sound, to its own archival material”. They have made a special mention for ‘The Shards’.In the short film section Crossroads: Filmmakers from the Canary Islands, the winning title has been 'Inmaculada', by Amos Milbor. The Jury has chosen it "for integrating heterogeneous elements (football, popular religiosity, art history) to account for the contrast between a hypermodern Canary Islands and customary roguishness".
The director of the Lanzarote Film Showcase and president of Tenique Cultural, Javier Fuentes Feo, highlighted at the closing that "one more year the deliberation has shown that this type of event is of great interest, as it is a public reflection and an in-depth analysis of what cinema is today."