Double Take takes Grand Prize at New Media Film Festival

Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take took the Grand Prize at this year’s New Media Film Festival (11-13 June). Double Take was the only foreign film in its category in an otherwise exclusively American competition.

The Grand Prize at the New Media fest comes with a studio package valued at $10,000 (€8,120). The film had already met with the approval of US critics, with the New York Times describing it as “The most intellectually agile of this year’s films” and since 2 June, the film has been attracting New York moviegoers at the Film Forum movie house. Its successful festival run has now seen it screen to audiences in locations such as Berlin, Sundance and Abu Dhabi, among others.

In Double Take, director Grimonprez casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in a double take on the cold war period. The master says all the wrong things at all the wrong times while politicians on both sides desperately clammer to say the right things, live on TV.

The New Media Film Festival offers a platform for innovative ideas and technology through visual media. It shows a mix of internet-based short films (webisodes), and documentaries and features that deal with new media.