Martinique International Film Festival
2017 Summer Edition

Martinique Snake Award ('best of the fest') & Best Latin & Carribbean Cinema Now: Tangled Bodies (Brazil) by Frederico Evaristo. It is a performance that talks about people connections.

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Best Narrative Feature Films: Drowned heart (Morocco) by Farid Lakkimi. To conclude his investigation, Inspector Medi meets with Souad, last assistant of the painter Kamal to get her testimony on the past events. With details and emotions, she recounts the tragic destiny of the people she knew. Human being are sometimes the instruments of their own death.

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Best Documentary Feature Films: Roshmia (Palestine) by Salim Abu Jabal. An elderly Palestinian couple in a final standoff with the israeli authorities to maintain their lifestyle in Roshmia; the last natural valley in Haifa. Yousef and his wife Amna, who originally descents from the Gypsies of Palestine, have lived in a shack all alone in their eighties since 1956 in what seems to be a life of serenity; far away from the loudness of modern life. Life remains peaceful in Roshmia until the israeli authorities endorse a new road project and order to confiscate their land, demolish the shack and throw them out. A friend of the couple tries to secure a compensation from the municipality but the shack is Yousef’s home that he insists on keeping; living in bliss and comfort as ever, however the negotiations continue and tension grows among the three. Furthermore, and besides the physical displacement and despair they are nearly facing, Yousef and Amna are about to go on separate ways.

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Best Narrative Short Films: For the opacity (Costa Rica) by Kuo-Jam Chen Sanchez. Inspired by the text of the Martinique Poet Édouard Glissant´s poetics of relation. ̈For the opacity ̈ -tries to bring together the claim for the right for the opacity as a political response on the western discourse of relation to the other, that underlines many aspects of the obsessive necessity of the western eye for the transparency and the poetics of contemporary dance and film.

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Best Documentary Short Films: The Poacher (UK) by Nicholas Jones. John collects wild produce that has recently become in demand through the gentrification of East London and the influx of trendy restaurants. These popular restaurants are after the freshness of locally handpicked food and John 'The Poacher' knows where it’s to be found. Witnessing John walking through London with a string of rabbits is as if we we are looking at an image of the past. John has the skills to identify wild food, trap animals and fish, skills most of of us have long forgotten. They say the streets of London are paved with gold, In John's case he simply bends down and picks it up. Following John through each season gives an insight into the rich produce that is there for us all, if only we could remember.

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Best Animated Short Films: Mannequin (USA) by Pete Burkeet. Rolling Acres Mall was built on August 6, 1975. At its peak, it contained 140 stores. The mall began its decline in the 1990's and closed in 2011. At one point all the walls were painted in pastels and people referred to it as "The Plastic Palace." It is now a magnet for pollution and negative energy.

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Best Experimental Short Films: HIWA (Greece) by Jacqueline Lentzou. In Jay's Athens, the sun is weak. You can look straight at it, without getting blind.

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