The Jury of the Lanzarote Film Festival has unanimously named A fidai film as the best film in the official section of the XIV edition. Its director, Kamal Aljafari, who has been present in Lanzarote this week of screenings, thanked the recognition and said that "the real prize has been being here, discovering the island, meeting friends and making new ones." He also asked for his country "a better future, and that one day we can live in peace and with dignity."
Aljafari received as an award a piece of ceramics from the Juan Brito Foundation, with the aim of becoming an object of everyday life and not a mere decorative object, according to the production manager of the Film Festival, Elena Azzedín.
The documentary, produced by Palestine, Germany, Qatar, Brazil and France, shows how war, apartheid and colonialist expansion in the Middle East, in addition to resorting to weapons, has also sought to dismantle the memory of the Palestinian people, through the destruction of film archives preserved in Beirut, which are the images of a people, a land and a culture.
The spokesman of the Jury, Vicente Monroy, highlighted of this film "its courage, its passion and its extreme power to ask questions and offer answers that invite us to think, and for the paths it opens to the future of cinema." He also expressed the difficulty in choosing one of the seven works in competition "to which we dedicated four hours and came to value three different titles," and described the section as "very combative and brave and of overwhelming and exceptional quality."
The special mention in this edition was for 7 promenades avec Mark Brown, by Pierre Creton and Vincent Barré, defined by Claire Allouche as "a small miracle, which uses scientific pedagogy to tell the story of the happy encounter with the origin of the world." Barré expressed his satisfaction for an award "that reaches the small community that has participated in this project."
Young Jury and Crossroads
For their part, the members of the young Jury have designated the Peruvian film Kimra, by Marco Panatonic, as the best film. The director thanked the award to a film that, he said, is made for young people. Like their elders, they designated 7 promenades avec Mark Brown with their special mention.
In the short film section Cruce de caminos: Filmmakers from the Canary Islands, the winning title was for De interés insular, by Marta Torrecilla. The argument is that one of the great problems that humanity will face over the next decades has to do with access to water. Melchor López, member of the Jury, called it "cinematographic haiku", and the director confessed to have worked "from intuition".
The director of the Lanzarote Film Festival and president of Tenique Cultural, Javier Fuentes Feo, highlighted the vocation of the event to be a space to share, to think together and to dialogue. "It is a project made by people for people, which bases its effort on the conviction that collaboration is fundamental."
The closing ceremony, held in El Almacén and conducted by the journalist Paola Delgado, ended with the screening of the film The Exterminating Angel by Luis Buñuel.
