Editor

TIFF - The 3rd Inigo Film Festival Awards took place August 16 - 19, 2011 in Madrid during WYD Sponsored by the Conference of European Provincials of the Jesuits www.tiffestival.org

Congratulations to the Winners 2011!

from left: Fidel Goetz Emerging Film Maker Award Winner Indrajith Mahawaduge (for Shalini Tharmalingam ); María Beguiristain (assistant director); First Prize Winner Piotr Zlotorowicz, Adrian Marbacher, S.J. (assistant director); Third Prize Winner Conor Heffernan; Audience Award
Winner Paddy Slattery; Christof Wolf, S.J. (festival director); Second Prize
Winner Vojin Vasovic.

Winner 1st prize: Smolarze (Charcoal Burners) (POLEN)

Winner 2nd prize: 5 Minutes Each (CANADA/SERBIA/MONTENEGRO)

Winner 3rd prize: The Song of Wandering Eamonn (IRELAND/UK)

Fidel Goetz Emerging Film Maker Award: Regrets (SRI LANKA)

Audience Award: The Moment (IRELAND)

The Jesuits proudly present the finest selection of short films from all over the world. Again, we focus on young filmmakers who grapple with the spiritual dimension of life. We honor films which reflect the spiritual yearnings and experiences of young people today, which show the presence and/or absence of God in our modern secularized world or which take into account the twin dimensions of faith and justice. From more than one hundred submissions we selected eighteen extraordinary films on the general theme of “City of God”. We will screen them in the CINE PAZ, a wonderful location in the heart of Madrid.

The composition of the films is much variegated. Among them, you can find exciting, thought-provoking ones as well as unsettled or funny ones. Through these films, you get an amazing impression of the varicolored, manifold and inspiring work of young filmmakers from all over the world. There are accounts of how an artist struggles to get five minutes of limelight or how a young girl wandering alone through Dublin encounters adults in various states of despair; how an illegal Vietnamese immigrant in Berlin is forced to sell cigarettes on the black market to survive; how hard the life of Polish charcoal burners is; how the “Catholic Conscience of Ireland” wanders the Irish countryside; how the final ten minutes of a man's life appear; how a woman regrets a crucial decision in her past; and many other great stories.

At the Awards ceremony on the 19th of August, the selection committee will announce the winners. There will be a first prize of EUR 2.500, with a second and third prize of EUR 1.500 and EUR 1.000 respectively. There will be two additional Awards: the “Fidel Goetz Emerging Film-Maker Award” and the other one chosen by the audience (“The Audience Award”). Here, your critical view will be asked. Your decision is meaningful and important and will select the winner for this Award!

The Jesuits support the Iñigo Film Festival, to encourage young filmmakers who reflect on spirituality and faith in their own way and who visualize the cultural and social variety of the legacy of God in the world – because “finding and searching for God in all things” means not only within religious rituals, in nature or in the encounter with others, but also in films, as our late pope John Paul II said: “The cinema enjoys a wealth of languages, a multiplicity of styles and a variety of narrative forms that are truly great. It thus offers an incomparable storehouse of expressive means for portraying the various areas in which the human being finds himself and for interpreting his inescapable calling to the beautiful, the universal and the absolute.”

The 3rd Iñigo Film Festival with its comprehensive program could not take place without the special support of our funding partners and our committed sponsors. Therefore, a very special thank you to all of them! We wish you great pleasure and many inspiring and contemplative moments while watching the films – and we hope you also get the chance to meet one of the filmmakers.

Best Regards

Fr. Christof Wolf, S.J.
Festival Director