Every October the highest value short film award in the world is given out in Cardiff. That award is the £30,000 Iris Prize, supported by The Michael Bishop Foundation, which is the only LGBT short film prize which allows the winner to make a new film.
At the culmination of a six days festival of LGBT film, the 2017 Iris Prize was awarded at a ceremony on Sunday afternoon.
This year, 35 short films were in contention from 20 countries. From amongst those, the winner was announced as filmmaker Mikael Bundsen’s Mother Knows Best. The 13-minute film consists of just two shots, focussing on a mother and her gay son as they drive somewhere after the mother has met her child’s boyfriend for the first time.
International Jury chair, Brian Robinson, commented, “Mother Knows Best is a brilliantly scripted and intense short film which uses a great economy of shots to tell a powerful and beautifully acted, universal story in which the realities of a young gay man’s different relationships with his parents are played out.”
The jury also commended the excellent Odd Job Man, about a middle-aged man whose life changes dramatically after he gets a job in a drag bar, as well as The Mess He Made, about a man waiting for the results of a rapid HIV test (you can watch The Mess He Made here).
The £20,000 Best British Short prize, sponsored by Pinewood Studios, was handed to We Love Moses, directed by Dionne Edwards. Best British jury chair Katie White said, “We Love Moses is a vividly realised tale of curiosity, secrecy and regret. One of its most refreshing aspects is the film’s mediation through the eyes of a young black girl, a perspective seldom foregrounded in cinema. Avoiding clichés of childhood innocence and naïveté, Edwards works more in the vein of a filmmaker like Catherine Breillat, allowing girlhood to be a space of sexual curiosity and wry observation.”
Along with the short films, numerous feature films also screened during the Iris Prize Festival. From those, the award for Best Performance in a Male Role went to Miles Szanto for Teenage Kicks, while Best Performance in a Female Role went to Fawzia Mirza for Signature Move. The Best Feature prize meanwhile went to Prom King, 2010, directed by debut feature filmmaker, Christopher Schaap.
Next year’s festival is already being planned for October 9th-14th 2018. (And take it from us, if you get the chance to attend, you should take it. They take their motto seriously – watch films, party nightly, repeat)
Come back to Big Gay Picture Show over the next few days for reviews of all of the short films that competed for this year’s International Iris Prize.
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