SPOT Film culminated Sunday evening with an award show in a packed Øst for Paradis. The winner of the main competition was A World Not Ours by the Danish-Palestinian Mahdi Fleifel. Malou Reymann’s Seksten en halv time received a special mention by the jury, while Kasper Rune Larsen won the pitch competition SPOT The Talent.

SPOT Festival landed safe and sound in a transformed Øst for Paradis with a big film finale after two days at the Godsbanen venue with 60 film screenings, director presentations and panel discussions. All day Sunday, Denmark’s most homely cinema was buzzing with interested film lovers lining up for the venue’s cinemas and enjoying solo concerts with SPOT artists in the newly-refurbished foyer.

‘It was only a matter of time before someone had the great idea to do this’, said host of the evening’s award show Kristian Leth while pointing to the screen with the SPOT Film logo. Only two awards were at stake on this first festival, so Leth started out by introducing the evening’s second to last award.

It was the pitch competition SPOT The Talent in which a shortlist of five individuals competed in pitching the best idea for a feature film in front of a jury consisting of Carsten Holst, CEO/Manager of Filmby Aarhus, Morten Hartz Kaplers, Director of Fund Aarhus Film Workshop and Michael Fleischer, SF Film. The winner was Kasper Rune Larsen, who receives DKK 100,000 in cash and DKK 400,000 reserved for production facilities, for his feature film idea Danmark.

Meta Louise Foldager commented: ‘The best idea is also the idea with the worst title – so we hope you will change that. Danmark is a generation portrait that springs from personal experiences and a ditto universe populated with offbeat characters – offbeat in a variety of ways. We look forward to seeing you run out of here with the money, and we know you will make the best of them’.

The SPOT Film Award
In the main competition jury consisted of Vibeke Windeløv flanked by Sonja Richter and Anders August and they had not, in their own words, wasted one single second judging the strong field of new Danish fiction and documentary directors from the upcoming layers of Danish film. The award went to Mahdi Fleifel’s A World Not Ours, a decision on which they had no second thoughts. Part of the reasoning behind ran:

’We laugh and live with, we follow the refugee camp through a couple of decades, we admire the people for their ability to live and retain hope – despite being bereft any chance to leave or even just joining the surrounding community and getting a job. We love grandpa, and when the lights go up we cannot bear the fact that the future is so hard for Abu Eyad. Mahdi does not point fingers, and yet we feel the tragic consequences of the creation of refugee camps. Truly a relevant film these days, when even more camps are constructed with unthought-of consequences for their inhabitants’.

Director Mahdi Fleifel was in Lebanon and unable to receive the award, but a video greeting with a thank you from the film’s producer Patrick Campbell was screened.

A World Not Ours has not yet seen cinema distribution in Denmark, but is published exclusively by the Danish film magazine Ekko. It is available here.

With the SPOT Film Award comes, apart from the acclaim, a mentor course with director Lone Scherfig and scriptwriter Nikolaj Scherfig, who in collaboration with the winner will schedule professional sparring and guidance sessions in connection with his next production. And even though the winner and the mentors deal in different areas of film – fiction and non-fiction – Vibeke Windeløv still thought the pairing a great match, as Fleifel initially had wanted to do a fiction film.

Special mention for Seksten en halv time
There was also an honouring mention of the young director talent Malou Reymann’s Seksten en halv time about which the jury, among other things, said:

‘A short fiction film with some very fine acting performances, not least from Frederikke Dahl Hansen. A film that leaves room for the viewer to continue building on the story and which makes us curious to learn more about the main character Anna’.

The evening’s host, Kristian Leth, had an eye for both music and film people among the audience and rounded off the proceedings with a ‘see you in the bar’, directed at the music crowd, and a ‘there are bubbles in the foyer’, directed at the film people.