35NOMINATIONS & 15 AWARDS in the last year
The Corona virus has put the whole world to a stop. Now that everyone is in quarantine it seemed a good time to recap and do an update. The past few months we won several nominations and film awards on film festivals world wide. This week on the Torino Underground Cinefest Ton van Zantvoort won the award for best director. There was a fierce competition of 13 films nominated and both fiction and documentary were included. Earlier this year Ton van Zantvoort’s film SHEEP HERO also won a mention for the most original story in Florence. The documentary SHEEP HERO is also nominated for the NL-Award for best RPO documentary of the year in the Netherlands. The NL-Award ceremony was supposed to be on March 25 with Minister Arie Slob, but this event was cancelled because of the Corona Virus. There are three documentaries nominated and the winner will be announced later this year.
SHEEP HERO screened on more than 75 international film festivals, won 15 awards and no less than 35 nominations.
A year after its release SHEEP HERO is still being selected and nominated by many great international documentary film festivals, such as this month in Washington D.C. on the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital DCEFF. All future events and festivals where SHEEP HERO is or was selected are now being cancelled, postponed or partly hold online because of Corona quarantine. Besides all the nominations and festivals, the film had a theatrical release in the Benelux and will be theatrical releassed in France. Several broadcasters have also shown the film on tv.
Jury report Torino Underground Cinefest Italy
There were 13 nominations for the feature films and the Jury awarded Ton Van Zantvoort as Best Director for “SHEEP HERO” claiming that “making a documentary appealing is a rather difficult task and Ton Van Zantvoort’s direction succeeds in it superbly! The care for the composition of the shots makes each frame a wonderful bucolic painting. The presence of the camera is never intrusive, managing to give the audience the illusion of really being there, at that precise moment, together with the characters (and sheep) populate this rural reality, framed in a photographic composition “frame as canvas” which is never an end in itself.
For the sensitivity and depth with which he faces the conflict between tradition and innovation, between dream and reality, between security and freedom, between personal and social life, between internal and external world, between simplicity and complexity. For the cleverness in the dual semantic use of the herd: as a real, physical flock to be followed through the great spaces of nature, guided by the best ideals, and as a metaphorical flock to conform to, sacrificing every desire for freedom. For the masterful use of the cinematographic artifice, well masked, almost invisible in unobtrusively telling a necessary story that projects the audience in the cruelty of the human condition. A story in which every feeling reveals itself as pure, spontaneous, sincere, authentic to the point of becoming touching! ”
Also read this wonderful review of Artsettima with references between Marx and Weber
…the capitalist system becomes destiny for the West according to the sociologist Max Weber who, in the metaphor of the steel cage, reveals how the contemporary subject is constrained – oppressive for small fish and functional for the big ones – which condemn man to a condition of tacit alienation.
Stijn Hilgers is held hostage by an invisible cage whose bars, in the form of rules and laws to be respected necessarily, make his possible escape impossible. Still, the pastor tries to force them, embodying idealistic spirits such as to make him a true contemporary hero, through manifestations, conferences, meetings with public bodies and events in the name of creativity.
It seems that for now history has proved Weber right instead of Marx: the invisible steel cage has no destiny, as the communist philosopher believed convinced that it should implode on itself given the obvious internal contradictions, but it is a destiny , the fate of the West reveals the German sociologist.
All awards and nominations below
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Have look at the website to see all screenings, nominations and awards.
See more AWARDS & NOMINATIONS here