Martinique International Film Festival
2017 Spring Edition

Martinique Snake Award (aka Best of the Fest) & Best Experimental Film: Imago Ep.II: Symmetry (Greece) by Dani Joss. The continuation of the protagonist's exploration of The Engineer's mysterious installation, as she further realises the rules of the world she's in. Mind games, metaphors, and nested storylines inform a narrative unique to the cinedance genre, in effect using sci-fi thriller conventions to inform an essay on the clash of postmodernism and neoromanticism at its heart. As semiotic references abound, the protagonist credited as “Interpretant )(.I” must figure out how to affect the outcome of other narrative constructs that are being brought to life in a setting where causality is merely a suggestion. Additionally, forces from that world will appear to her to help, obstruct, or simply indicate, as she attempts to understand the rules and symmetries of her predicament.

Although a direct continuation of ep.I: Orientation longer story arc, Imago ep.II: Symmetry can be watched on its own.

Best Narrative Feature Film: The Algebra of Need (UK) by David Williams. An unnamed woman in Buffalo for the weekend to shoot a movie that is never made meets a unnamed man whom she may or may not know from some time before. Unwilling to reveal anything about themselves, or perhaps having forgotten how to communicate at all, they instead recite pieces of classic art house cinema dialogue, fragments from Burroughs and Sartre, and a series of non sequiturs. A homage to 60s French New Wave, European Art-House Cinema and American Underground film - "The Algebra of Need" plays with space and time, continuity and the conventions of film-making and story.

Best Documentary Feature Film: Rest Stop (France) by Isabelle Ingold. Picturing a highway rest stop, this documentary traces out the portrait of Europe today.

Best Narrative Short Film: Bare romance (Belgium) by Karel Tuytschaever. A woman awaits the arrival of a man. They don’t know one another. The only string between them is the engagement to meet and make use of each other. In an empty house in the woods they are faced with their search for love and their ambivalent sexuality.

Bare Romance shows the minimal, raw aesthetic of the waywardly loving body.

Best Documentary Short Film :Last Dance on the Main (Canada) by Aristofanis Soulikias. While a row of historic buildings on Montreal’s St Laurent boulevard is being demolished by politicians and building developers, the local community resists.

Best Animated Short Film: Body without organs (USA) by Mark Franz. "body without organs" is an experimental animation that explores the mystical singularity of the body in terms of its separate functioning parts. Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use this term to refer to the "cosmic egg" of life.

Best Latin Film: Umbral - After dying by Thomaz Magalhaes. Umbral is where everyone goes after death.

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