From Wednesday 10 through Sunday 14 April 2019, Willemstad will host the eighth edition of Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam (CIFFR). The festival screens the highlights of the most recent edition of the IFFR, exciting new titles from other film festivals, and promising new work by filmmakers from the region, most importantly in its Yellow Robin Award Competition and the Caribbean Shorts Competition.
The CIFFR opens with the screening of Nadine Labaki’s Oscar-nominated Capharnaüm, winner of the BankGiro Loterij Audience award at the IFFR 2019. Next to the IFFR highlights, the programme of the following days includes films such as Shoplifters by Hirokazu Kore-eda, If Beale Street Could Talk by Barry Jenkins, and the Hubert Bals Fund-supported Monos, by Alexis Dos Santos and Alejandro Landes.
Yellow Robin Award Competition
For the seventh time, the CIFFR presents the Yellow Robin Award Competition, in which five films by emerging filmmakers from the Caribbean and Latin America compete for the Yellow Robin Award. This year’s selections are Las campañas de invierno by Rafael Ramírez (Cuba), En cenizas by Camila Rodríguez Triana (Colombia), Noemí Gold by Dan Rubenstein (Argentina), Tierra adentro by Mauro Colombo (Panama) and Xquipi’ Guie’dani by Xavi Sala (Mexico).
An international jury picks the winning film, which is guaranteed a spot in the IFFR 2020’s Bright Future programme and will also screen at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico later in the year. The winning filmmaker receives a cash prize of $2,500 as well as $7,500 worth of training in the context of talent development in programmes such as BoostNL or CineMart.
The IFFR’s festival director Bero Beyer stated, “The IFFR’s sister festival in Curaçao gives the filmmaking talent of the Caribbean region a window to the world. The winner of last year’s Yellow Robin Award, Khalik Allah, came to Rotterdam in January 2019 to present his gut wrenching film Black Mother and gave a big talk in collaboration with World Press Photo. A name to remember. The films selected for the upcoming competition promise to be just as exciting.”
The CIFFR 2019 will also see the third instalment of the Caribbean Shorts Competition. This programme is the result of a region-wide collaboration between seven film festivals – in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago and Curaçao. Each festival has submitted a short film to enter the Caribbean Shorts Competition. The winning film will later screen at all these festivals, as well as the next edition of the IFFR.
And more
In a thematic programme, the CIFFR investigates the phenomenon of redu, a Papiemento term for gossip or ‘through the grapevine’, in the context of fake news. Films screened within this thematic programme include Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki, Carlos Sorín’s Joel, Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows, Eliot Higgins’s Bellingcat and Olivier Assayas’s Doubles Vies.
In a special mini-programme called Caribbean Artists in Focus, the CIFFR screens a number of short films paying homage to ground-breaking artists in the region. Selections include the documentary portrait of Curaçao-based artist Geerdine Kuijpers entitled Free as a Bird by Curaçaoan filmmaker Sharelly Emanuelson, and Hollandse Meesters in de 21ste eeuw, as well as Tirzo Martha by Dutch filmmaker and IFFR programmer, Tessa Boerman.
