The Colombian film “Pájaros de verano”, directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, was made today with the Grand Jury Prize for Best Film at the 36th Miami Film Festival, in which the documentary “Screwball” by the American Billy Corben, he won the Audience Award.
The “viscerally shocking epic about the origins of Colombian drug trafficking,” according to a statement issued by the organization this Saturday, has been made with the Knight Marimbas, the main prize of the cinéfila appointment endowed with $ 45,000 in cash, which will be distributed among the Colombian producer Ciudad Lunar and the distributor in the US, The Orchard.
The film, the Colombian bid to be nominated for best non-English film at the last edition of the Oscars, will be premiered in the United States in selected halls of various cities, including Miami, on April 15, as reported this Saturday.
The documentary “Screwball”, which scrutinizes the roots of a recent high-profile scandal of the US Baseball Major League and in that search reaches “the shaded tanning halls of South Florida”, according to the official announcement, He won the Audience Award.
In the Ibero-American Film Award HBO section, in which 22 films competed, the one chosen by the jury was the feature film “Luciérnagas”, a coproduction between the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Greece and the US, and directed by Bani Khoshnoudi, which took the appointment of Miami its premiere in the United States.
The short film “Esta es tu Cuba”, by Cuban-American Brian Robau, which deals with the drama of the Cuban exodus to the US known as Pedro Pan, won the HBO Ibero-American Short Film Award, while the Brazilian “Socrates”, from Alexandre Moratto, won the award for best debut feature Jordan Ressler.
In the Knight Made in MIA Award category, for fictions whose plot takes place in South Florida, the winners were “Pahokee”, by Ivette Lucas and Patrick Bresnan, as the best feature film, and in a short film there was a tie between “Liberty”, Faren Humes, and “Six Degrees of Immigration”, by Jayme Gershen.
“The Nightingale”, by Australian Jennifer Kent, who won the Special Jury Prize in the last edition of the Venice Film Festival, repeated the award in Miami when she won the René Rodríguez Critics Award, given by a group of critics that covered the festival.
With a program that included 160 films, documentaries and shorts from 40 countries, the thirty-sixth edition of the Miami Film Festival, which ends on Sunday, gave special recognition to the American actress Patricia Clarkson.
This year’s edition included new programs such as “Knight Heroes”, which focuses on the new generations of filmmakers in South Florida and this edition featured a talk by Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”), director Boots Riley and screenwriter Aaron Stewart-Ahn.
This year’s contest also echoes the success of the Spanish series, as in the case of “Gigantes”, which has had its American “premiere” on the closing night of the festival, this Saturday, where two subtitled chapters are screened in English.
From this cinematographic event, its executive director, Jaie Laplante, highlighted in a recent interview with Efe its “dynamic and multifaceted personality, strong and distinct”, values that have reinforced, he affirmed, its “attractiveness and monitoring during the last years”.
