At an awards ceremony held in the Heritage Area, Heart of Sharjah, the Sharjah Art Foundation honored exceptional films in the experimental, narrative, and documentary categories at the recently finished Sharjah Film Platform 5 (SFP5).
The Foundation also revealed the winner of this year’s Pitching Forum, an open-call contest for feature-length screenplays.
Over 30 regional and international films by up-and-coming and distinguished filmmakers were screened during the sixth Sharjah Film Platform. Speaking engagements, master seminars, and musical performances were all part of the yearly film festival’s schedule.
Three films per category—feature, short, and honorable mention—were chosen by an outside panel of filmmakers, reviewers, and producers for the 2018 Sharjah Film Platform Awards.
Fernando Portabales’ “Copacabana Papers” (2021) won the Best Experimental Short Film. The award went to How to Reverse a Spell: The Promise of an Archive, directed by Yasmine Benabdallah in 2022.
The short film “uses the computer screen itself as a sort of reflection on locating and accessing lost public archives in Morocco.” The jury praised the concept of “desktop cinema” and further stated that the “disappearance of this information creates important questions relating not only to Morocco but to other governments in the area as well.”
This “haunting and hypnotic short” about water, which was produced without the aid of computer effects, was chosen by the jury. “The film provided an essential reminder about the delicate state of the natural ecology on this planet,” the jury stated.
The Anis Lasso-directed film, “A Second Life, GADHA” (2022), won the Best Narrative Feature Film award. The panel declared that the movie was “both touching and inspiring. The judges were greatly moved by the actors’ performances, which were exquisitely crafted and performed.
Hello (2022), a short film by Catherine Mazoyer, won the award for Best Narrative. With its “beautiful and thought-provoking plot that escapes a somber tone,” the movie enthralled the jury.
The winner of this year’s Pitching Forum was also selected by a jury of filmmakers and business professionals. The $10,000 award went to Sameeha bint Saeed Alavi to help with the filming of her Arabic-language, feature-length screenplay titled “Nabil.”
The Pitching Forum, sponsored by Sharjah Media City (Shams), is a component of the SFP Industry Hub, which was established to encourage professionals in the film industry and to help filmmakers by putting them in contact with such professionals.
The Industry Hub also includes the Script Lab, a professional script writing school, in addition to The Pitching Forum. The most recent addition The Network of Alternative Arab Screens (NAAS) and the Film Circulation Initiative collaborate to make it possible for short and long films to be distributed through NAAS’s network and platform.
