The Brooklyn Film Festival (BFF) announced the winners of this year’s festival held June 3 – June 12, 2011 at IndieScreen and Brooklyn Heights Cinema. Fittingly enough, a film about Brooklyn, ‘Battle For Brooklyn’ by Suki Hawley & Michael Galinsky took the Grand Chameleon Award and the award for Best Documentary.  BATTLE for BROOKLYN is an intensely intimate look at the very public and passionate fight waged by owners and residents facing condemnation of their property to make way for the controversial Atlantic Yards project, a massive plan to build 16 skyscrapers and a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets in the heart of Brooklyn. Shot over seven years and compiled from almost 500 hours of footage, BATTLE for BROOKLYN is an epic tale of how far people will go to fight for what they believe in.

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W Zappatore by Massimiliano Verdesca was the other big winner, taking the awards for Best Documentary and Best Actress for Sandra Milo. This hilarious, quirky Italian comedy explores the question: is it better to play the music of Satan or listen to the word of God? Marcello Zappatore is 33 years old. He earns a living by playing electric guitar in a Satanist heavy metal band. However, Marcello has a physical problem: an uncomfortable itch on the side of his rib cage that soon turns out to be stigmata. Is it divine intervention or just time for a change? Marcello does not know the answer, and the stigmata is causing him many problems. In one go, he loses his girlfriend and the flat they share, and is kicked out of his band. Marcello now finds himself ready to undertake a very personal voyage between two very different and incompatible worlds… that of God and that of Rock.

2011 Brooklyn Film Festival winners:

GRAND CHAMELEON AWARD
BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN by Suki Hawley & Michael Galinsky

Best Narrative Feature
W. ZAPPATORE by Massimiliano Verdesca

Best Documentary
BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN by Suki Hawley & Michael Galinsky

Best Narrative Short
RITA by Antonio Piazza & Fabio Grassadonia

Best Animation
A MORNING STROLL by Grant Orchard

Best Experimental
DAME FACTORY by Melanie Abramov

Best New Director
SLAVA ROSS for Siberia Monamour