Sponsored by Gérard Jugnot with actress Aissa Maiga as president of the jury, the third Porquerolles Film Festival awarded its Grand Prix to the overwhelming Utama, the forgotten land, by Peruvian director Alejandro Loayza Grisi, devoted to the consequences of drought on Peruvian populations. The jury also awarded a prize to college students invited to make a film on environmental causes.
After two editions limited by the Covid 19 crisis, in 2020 and 2021, the third Porquerolles Film Festival ended on June 12 after the vicissitudes inherent in the organization of such an event on an island. If imponderables punctuated the event, they did not alter the enthusiasm of the organizers, its initiator Vincent Doerr in the lead, nor the sponsor Gérard Jugnot or the jury. As for the public, it was present in a good-natured and family atmosphere, in an exceptional setting.
The Grand Prize awarded to Utama, the forgotten land (released on May 11) reflects the ambition of the festival: to raise awareness of the environmental causes addressed by filmmakers from all over the world. Thus the drought in Peru in Main creates the heartbreak of an old couple. Lama breeders, they are encouraged by their grandson to join the city to survive. A cultural trauma that the sick old man will refuse, preferring to end his life where he has always lived. The end of a world. Beautiful and heartbreaking, the film released on May 11 in France, is still in theaters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lox1P03EHVk
The Jury Prize rewarded Birds of America by Jacques Lœuille, about the French-born American painter and illustrator Jean-Jacques (or John James) Audubon (1785-1851) who devoted his life to listing and painting the birds of America. A Special Mention from the Jury distinguished the film The Factory of Pandemics by Marie-Monique Robin in which Juliette Binoche goes to meet scientists to understand the recent emergence of diseases, rare or unknown, such as Dengue, Chikungunya, Covid-19, AIDS, or Ebola.
Six teams of middle school students from sixth to third grade, from the island of Porquerolles and Hyères, responded to the organizers’ call to make short films on an environmental theme of their choice, in the form of a documentary or fiction. . Visible on YouTubetheir films will soon be broadcast on France 2. The Grand Prize was awarded to The Earth is beautiful, but… directed by 6th grade students from Collège Gustave Roux in Hyères, and the Jury Prize went to Cans on the Ground filmed by middle school students from the Center Val des Rougières in Hyères.
The Porquerolles Film Festival is a bit like the anti-Cannes festival, where festival-goers would have swapped tuxedos and evening dresses for bermudas and flip-flops. A relaxed atmosphere, to which the organizer wants to breathe a little more rigor, which is still somewhat lacking in this beautiful festival, young and disabled due to a birth in the midst of a pandemic. He is nevertheless enthusiastic working, in an enchanting island, on a serious but always neglected subject, well defended in the cinema.
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