“Kill Crabs” and “Circe” Take Top Honors at Las Palmas Film Festival

The movie kill crabsby director Omar A. Razzak, and the play Circeby María Abenia Gracia, have won the Richard Leacock Awards for Best Feature Film and Best Short Film at the 22nd Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival.

The jury in charge of assessing the works presented in the Canarias Cinema section, made up of Ione Atenea, Virginia Pablos and Suso Novás Andrade, made its decision public this Monday at a press conference in which they read the list of winners.

The jury has awarded 3,000 euros to the director of the feature kill crabs (Spain, the Netherlands, 2023, 106 min.), among the five titles competing in this edition, “for its panoramic reflection on a disenchanted paradise on the verge of transformation and for reflecting the feeling of emptiness about the things that could have to be and were not from a universe of children and adolescents”, as reported in a statement by the organization of the contest.

The Richard Leacock Award for Best Short Film, endowed with 1,500 euros, has gone to the work presented by María Abenia Gracia Circe (Spain, 2022, 29 min.). The jury valued the short film for “its unique ability to illustrate the relationships between peoples, their mythology and their heterodox cultural heritage through a successful staging, which chooses to vindicate the sensory capacity of cinema while in dialogue with seminal cinematographic currents”. .

The filmmaker Ione Atenea and the festival programmers and directors Virginia Pablos and Suso Novás Andrade have also awarded two other recognitions among the twelve works that competed in the Canary Islands section.

In the feature film category, the film “I had a life” (Spain, 2023, 71 min.), by Octavio Guerra, received a special mention from the jury “for its thoughtful illustration of the consequences and possible solutions to homelessness and for his questioning of care policies from a correct observational modality”.

The short film “Shirampari: Herencias del río” (Spain, 2022, 16 min.), a work by Lucía Flórez, whose ability to “make the audience a privileged witness to the resistance of a community, has also received a special mention. aboriginal in the contemporary world, placing special emphasis on cultural transmission as the main guarantor of their survival”.

In addition to the prizes decided by the official jury of the Canarias Cinema section, the titles participating in the section opt for a distribution prize granted by the Canarian audiovisual production company Digital 104.

The jury of the 104 Digital Distribution Award, made up of Domingo J. González, Jonay García and Andrea García, has also awarded the prize to the short film presented by Lucía Flórez, ‘Shirampari: Herencias del río’ “for the naturalness with which it introduces us to in an indigenous community of the Peruvian Amazon by the hand of a child about to say goodbye to childhood”.

The short film will have an international distribution strategy, advice, management, registration and shipments to national and international festivals for a year by the company Digital 104.