The winning films of the 40th International Film Festival Rotterdam were announced and the three Tiger Awards were granted to feature débuts:
* The Journals of Musan by Park Jung-Bum (South Korea)
* Finisterrae by Sergio Caballero (Spain, 2010)
* Eternity by Sivaroj Kongsakul (Thailand, 2010, supported by the Hubert Bals Fund).
On the occasion of IFFR’s 40th jubilee edition, the one-off and shared Return of the Tiger Award went to Oki’s Movie by Hong Sang-Soo (South Korea) and Club Zeus by David Verbeek (Netherlands/China).
Tiger Awards
Fourteen first or second films competed in the 2011 Tiger Awards Competition. The Jury consisted of Lucrecia Martel, filmmaker, scriptwriter and film producer (Argentina); Sandra den Hamer, director of the EYE Film Institute Netherlands and former IFFR director; filmmaker Andrei Ujica (Romania); Wisit Sasanatieng, filmmaker (Thailand) and Lee Ranaldo, vocalist, guitarist, composer and co-founder of noise rock band Sonic Youth (USA). Each Tiger Award comes with a prize of Euro 15,000 for the filmmaker.
This edition, the Tiger Awards Competition is supported by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.
The jury statements on the Tiger Award winning films:
Finisterrae by Sergio Caballero (Spain, 2010)
‘The outsider in this competition. Searching for the boundaries in this festival, for the edgy, the off-beat. Best animal performances in a film. The ghost of this competition.’
Eternity by Sivaroj Kongsakul (Thailand, 2010)
‘With a great sense of cinematic duration, this film builds its own universe, finding its own pacing, so consistently, to tell its particular story. A film that seems on the surface to be about death but which is really about love, a beautiful and delicate love story.’
Eternity is supported by IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund.
The Journals of Musan by Park Jung-Bum (South Korea, 2010)
‘A strongly constructed narrative. A survivor’s story. Throughout the film the character, immersed in an ethical disorientation, keeps a constant demeanor. A mature debut film for a new director. This social drama provides us with another dimension or perspective on the Korean situation.’
Return of the Tiger Award
The Return of the Tiger program will be accompanied by a one-off award, the Return of the Tiger Award. The fifteen directors of the fourteen films competing in the Tiger Awards Competition 2011 were asked to decide together on the winner of this unique award, worth € 5,000.
The program and the Return of the Tiger Award are intended as a gesture of appreciation towards those filmmakers who have taken the first steps of their careers on the international stage at the Rotterdam festival, and as a token of the festival’s ongoing support for these filmmakers.
The joint decision resulted in a shared Return of the Tiger Award for:
Oki’s Movie by Hong Sang-Soo (South Korea, 2010) and Club Zeus by David Verbeek (Netherlands/China, 2011)
Hong Sang-Soo won a Tiger Award in 1997 for his feature debut The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well. David Verbeek’s second feature film Shanghai Trance was nominated for a Tiger Award in 2008. Club Zeus will be released April/May 2011 in Dutch art houses by Cinema Delicatessen.