01/12/2003

The Belfort International Film Festival, Entre Vues has awarded three main prizes to the French director Abdellatif Kechiche and his film L’Esquive. The three awards were the Grand Prize for a French Feature Length Film, the Public Prize and the Gérard Frot-Coutaz Prize. This is further recognition for a filmmaker, who has already won awards in 2000 for his first film, La faute a Voltaire. L’Esquive is produced by Lola Film, and is about the daily life of 15 year-old Abdelkrim, who lives in the Parisian suburbs with his mother, who works in a supermarket, while his father is in prison. He has a dream to go around the world in a sail boat. The film is being released in French cinemas on january 7, 2004 and will be distributed in around 50 prints by Rezo Films. The winner of the international competition was the Italian, Michelangelo Frammartino for his Il Dono [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which already won a prize in October at the Festival of Italian Cinema in Annecy. This first feature length film written and directed by the young filmmaker is produced by Santamira Produzioni . It has virtually no dialogue and shows the depopulation of a village in the Southern Italian region of Calabria.
The Festival awarded a Special Mention to the Portuguese film by Manuel Mozos, Xavier. The Grand Prize for Documentary Feature Length Film went to Rafi Pitts for Abel ferrara: not guilty, the Grand Prize for French Short Film was won jointly by Petits pas by Thomas Salvador and La nuit sera longue by Olivier Torres, while the Grand Prize for Best Foreign Short Film was awarded to the Dutch work, Courant d’air by Nora Martirosyan.

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(Translated from French)