The first winners of IFFR 2020

Today, the jury announced the winners of this year’s Ammodo Tiger Short Competition. From a selection of 21 films, Apparition by Ismaïl Bahri, Communicating Vessels by Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell, and Sun Dog by Dorian Jespers win three equal awards in IFFR’s short film competition.

Today, the jury announced the winners of this year’s Ammodo Tiger Short Competition. From a selection of 21 films, Apparition by Ismaïl Bahri, Communicating Vessels by Maïder Fortuné and Annie MacDonell, and Sun Dog by Dorian Jespers win three equal awards in IFFR’s short film competition.

Each year, IFFR celebrates the power of short: films between 1 and 65 minutes long, from all over the world, compete for three Ammodo Tiger Short Awards, each worth €5,000. There are fiction films, experimental work and documentaries – and a professional jury to decide which three films prevail.

This year, the jury consisted of recently appointed director of Kunsthal Rotterdam Nathanja van Dijk, French filmmaker and previous Tiger Award for Short Films winner Safia Benhaim (La fièvre, at IFFR 2014), and Los Angeles-born, Belgrade-based film curator and writer Greg de Cuir Jr.

According to the jury, Apparition is “a short and poetic piece that contemplates history and memory through the materiality of the moving image.” The film, focusing on a crowd gathering on Tunisia's independence day in 1956, “deals with politics, the suppleness of gesture, and the fleeting nature of our collective footing in tumultuous moments in time.”

The jury calls Communicating Vessels “an incredibly intricate and layered work about being haunted by someone else’s story.” Through the eyes of her professor, the film tells the peculiar story of E., a young woman whose performance pieces and singular existence leave the professor increasingly adrift. It’s a “tribute to the efforts of a generation of pioneering women and the conceptual art they created. Also a meditation on motherhood, the responsibility of teaching and the fluid boundary between art and life. How does one imprint narratives and ideas on bodies and minds?”

For the Belgian graduation film Sun Dog, the jury lauds the way Jespers “demonstrates a visionary approach to the tale of a young man adrift at the end of the world. A subjective piece that captures the acute delirium of tedious work and an environment that is harsh and unforgiving. The final, very uncanny image of two suns breaking through the clouds and rising in the distance is one of the more striking images of the Ammodo Tiger Short Competition.”

Sun Dog has also been selected as IFFR’s Short Film Candidate for the European Short Film Awards 2020.

The jury gave a special mention to Wong Ping’s Fables 2 by Wong Ping, saying: “This admirable work, whose sharp political satire and madcap animation started so memorably last year in the award-winning first part of the series, continues to keep a finger on the pulse of society.”

Ammodo, an organisation supporting art and science, became official partner of the competition in 2018.