MIFF 2015 The Winners
The 37th edition of the Moscow International Film Festival ended two days ago and the winner in the documentary competition was American “Cartel Land” by Matthew Heinemann.
According to the festival’s main communicator, filmmaker and festival programmer, Georgy Molodtsov: “Overall, with 19 films (7 in competition and 12 out of competition in the Free Thought section) we collected 4338 votes. Together with press screenings we’ve counted around 5500-5750 viewers for documentaries only. It was a great festival, great films and, of course, great audience…”.
Talking about the votes, enthusiastic Molodtsov refers to the decision on who should have the audience award. I am sure he won’t protest that I quote from his FB page:
When I saw tears on the faces of the most cynical documentary filmmakers after the screening of this film, I hoped that it would win. Yesterday I’ve been told, that in the third screening of the film in a 90 seats screening hall of Documentary Film Center 119 votes were collected and some people just weren’t able to get to the screening even on stairs…
The film in question, winner of the audience award, is “My Love, Don’t Cross That River” (photo) from Korean Mo-Young Jin that got 4.81 out of 5 points from the audience, whereas “Racing Extinction” by American Louie Psihoyos was next with 4.77 out of 5, Joshua Oppenheimer got 4,69 for “The Look of Silence” and Laura Poitras 4,61 for “Citizenfour”.