Skip City rewards film about Rwandan genocide

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Festival News

The 8th Skip City International D-Cinema Festival ＳＫＩＰシティ国際Ｄシネマ映画祭 (8-16 Oct 2011) has awarded its ¥1.5 million ($19,400) Grand Prize to Rwandan film Kinyarwanda.

Directed by Alrick Brown, Kinyarwanda premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the world cinema audience award. The drama interweaves six stories at the time of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The festival jury, headed by producer OGURA Satoru 小椋悟, gave the best director prize to Vanja d'Alcantara for Beyond the Steppes, the best screenplay prize to South America's Chance and the Special Jury Prize to Sweden's Simple Simon.

"The selected films were rather analog; in other words, they were the ones to express the humanity deeply, even though they were shot in digital. I hope the filmmakers would keep making emotional films in digital," Ogura said.

The Skip City Award, a non-cash prize, went to KOHASHI Kenji 小橋賢児's Don't Stop! ＤＯＮ’Ｔ　ＳＴＯＰ！ (2011). At the closing ceremony, it was announced that the festival would support the theatrical distribution of the documentary in Japan.

Festival organisers said that this year's competition received 494 submissions from 81 countries.

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