Rotterdam 2015: Here Are The Winners

This weekend saw the end of the current edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and that means all award winners were announced as well. First and foremost among these are the Hivos Tiger Awards, encouragement prizes which can only be won for a director's first or second film. Each year three filmmakers get the award, which consists of (among other things) 15,000 Euro a person.


The Hivos Tiger Award winners this year were:

Carlos M. Quintela (Cuba) for The Project of the Century,
Juan Daniel F. Molero (Peru) for Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes),
Jakrawal Nilthamrong (Thailand) for Vanishing Point.

That's all three of them above, with festival director Rutger Wolfson looming behind them.


The Fipresci Award for best World Premiere at this festival, awarded by a jury of international film critics, went to:

Isabelle Tollenaere (Belgium) for Battles.


The Big Screen Award is for films which haven't gotten a distribution deal in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg yet, and consists of a monetary award for distributors to cover for publicity expenses. This year, the winner was:

Debbie Tucker Green (United Kingdom) for Second Coming.


Chosen from the same selection as the Big Screen Award is the KNF award, from the Dutch Circle of Film Critics. Their choice was:

Michael Noer (Denmark) for Key House Mirror.


The NETPAC Award, given by the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema, is for the best Asian film at the festival. This year, their choice was:

Ju Anqi (China) for Poet on a Business Trip.


The MovieZone Award is given by a jury of young critics, and went to:

James Napier Robertson (New Zealand) for The Dark Horse.


Next there were the audience awards, which tend to differ greatly from the critics and jury awards. Baiting the paying public can be even harder than baiting the juries, so this is always interesting.

Winning the festival's big audience prize of 10,000 Euro was James Napier Robertson (New Zealand) for The Dark Horse, with an unfathomably high mean score of 4.7 out of 5. Any film scoring higher than 4.0 out of 5 can easily be considered a crowdpleaser, so... whoa! We'll present you soon with the full top-15 so you can see what it had to go up against, as this year there was a remarkable high number of films scoring higher than 4.5.

The Hubert Bals Film Fund is an important partner of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, so there is also the Dioraphte award for the highest-scoring film made with the help of that fund. This year, the awarded filmmaker was Oscar Ruiz Navia (Colombia) for Los Hongos, which scored a 3.9 out of 5.


The Canon Tiger Awards for short films were awarded to:

Ben Rivers (United Kingdom) for Things,
Safia Benhaim (France) for La Fièvre,
Ben Russell (USA) for Greetings to the Ancestors.


You can see the full list at the Festival website.

(Picture courtesy of IFFR.)