Senegalese ‘Banel & Adama’ and Soda Jerk’s ‘Hello Dankness’ Among Top Award Winners at Melbourne Film Festival
On the final weekend of the 18-day event, the in-person edition of the 2023 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) ended with an awards ceremony that saw AUD $300,000 (over USD $191,000) in prize money handed out across six categories. The individual award of AUD $140,000 (nearly USD $90,000) for the festival’s international Bright Horizons competition was Banel & Adama, a debut feature by Franco-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy.
Banel & Adama is still looking for distribution in the United States and other important markets after making its world premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023. Its victory at MIFF came up against tough competition in the Bright Horizons selection, including films like Phm Thiên Ân’s debut film Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which back on the Croisette defeated Banel & Adama for the Camera d'Or, and Molly Manning Walker's Cannes Un Certain Regard winner How to Have Sex.
Jointly chairing the jury were musician and filmmaker Saul Williams and his co-director Anisia Uzeyman, the winner of the 2022 inaugural Bright Horizons award with their inventive Afro-futurist vision Neptune Frost. Their fellow jurors included filmmakers Alexandre O. Philippe (78/52, Lynch/Oz), Anthony Chen (Ilo Ilo, The Breaking Ice), and Kamila Andini (The Seen and Unseen, Yuni). In a collective statement, they described Sy’s debut as “a film that speaks directly to the times with a cinematic language and landscape that challenges and confronts while drawing you into its immense beauty” and “a mysterious and strong first film from a young filmmaker with bright horizons.”
The jury offered a special mention to another female filmmaker, Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés, whose drama Tótem was a critics’ favorite at the Berlinale in February 2023. They claim the film had “the rich subtleties and nuance of this circular story draws us in and makes us a part of its family.” The jury also determined the Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award — an AUD $70,000 (nearly USD $45,000) prize restricted to homegrown talent — to sibling filmmakers Dominique and Dan Angeloro, professionally known as Soda Jerk.
Already celebrated on the experimental scene for sample-based works like Terror Nullius and After the Rainbow, Soda Jerk has been traveling the festival circuit over the past year with their latest Hello Dankness, which reflects on Trumpism, COVID, and other recent socio-political matters via multimedia fragments. The jury called it “a clear-eyed, sharply satirical take on one of America’s most troubling chapters, transformative use of existing footage, and groundbreaking manipulation thereof.” Hello Dankness is set to receive a limited Stateside release on September 8, 2023.
The First Nations Film Creative Award for outstanding filmmaking and storytelling talent from Australia’s First Nations population was presented to Adrian Russell Wills and Gillian Moody’s documentary Kindred. The film is an autobiographical reflection on Aboriginal children removed from their birth families. Another local documentary took the festival’s Audience Award and its Youth Jury Award: Thomas Charles Hyland’s This Is Going to Be Big, an emotional portrait of a high school for neurodivergent teens as they stage an ambitious musical.
This collective of winners reflects the spread of a vast, diverse festival program that also saw fresh innovations in its retrospective sections. Voices previously unheard have resurfaced, as with Senegalese documentary maker Safi Faye — the first woman from sub-Saharan Africa ever to direct a commercially distributed feature. Months after her death in February 2023, a career tribute introduced legions of cinephiles to her under-seen work.
A newly presented section, Critical Condition, invited international critics mentoring on the festival’s adjacent Critics’ Campus program for new writers to exhibit a favorite classic or undervalued film and moderate a post-screening discussion to contextualize it for contemporary audiences. The list of MIFF winners includes:
Bright Horizons Award (presented by VicScreen): Banel & Adama, directed by Ramata-Toulaye Sy
Bright Horizons Special Jury Mention: Tótem, directed by Lila Avilés
Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award: Soda Jerk, directors of Hello Dankness
First Nations Film Creative Award in collaboration with Kearney Group: Adrian Russell Wills and Gillian Moody, directors of Kindred
MIFF Audience Award: This Is Going to Be Big, directed by Thomas Charles Hyland
MIFF Schools Youth Jury Award: This Is Going to Be Big, directed by Thomas Charles Hyland