Steve Thielemans’s Desert Island took the FIPA d’Or for Creative Documentary at this year's 25th International Festival of Audiovisual Programs (FIPA, 23-29 Jan). Lotte Stoops’ Grande Hotel received the Michel Mitrani Prize. No less than eight Flemish productions screened at FIPA this year.
The Michel Mitrani Award, named after the late founder of the Festival and worth €8,000, is traditionally awarded by France Télévision on the night prior to the closing ceremony. The jury of five selected Grande Hotel from a total of seven nominated films from different sections of the festival.
Grande Hotel had its world premiere at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam last year. From there the documentary went on to festivals such as Hot Docs, where it received an Honourable Mention, The Transilvania International Film Festival and the Margaret Mead Festival in New York. Grande Hotel takes viewers on a trip to Mozambique where a luxury hotel from the 1950s now stands as a shadow of its former glory. The hotel accommodates over 3,500 permanent occupants today. They reside in miserable conditions, often surrounded by danger and violence.
The FIPA d’Or in Biarritz is not the first award for Steve Thielemans’s Desert Island (L'île déserte). Last year the film was named Best Belgian Documentary by the jury of the Docville Documentary Festival in Leuven. Desert Island is an uncompromising, intimate and dark portrait of a young man trying to cope with his fate.
Thielemans graduated from the RITS Film Academy in 2006 with The Substitute, about a Dutch teacher filling in a temporary spot in a Brussels school and having trouble maintaining discipline in his classroom. His graduation documentary also won him a VAF Wildcard which enabled him to start on his first professional docu, Desert Island. The VAF Wildcard programme is aimed at giving recently graduated filmmaking talent the chance to embark on a first professional project.
Desert Island was produced by Peter Krüger for Inti Films. Grande Hotel is a production of Ellen De Waele for Serendipity Films. Both titles were made with the support of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund.