The stakes are high for the 45th Durban International Film Festival

Film festival juries come from a variety of backgrounds. Source: Supplied.

Movie Series

“The stakes are high, the competition is fierce, and no matter who takes home the coveted prize, the real winner is the audience that feels the awe, joy and wonder that so many films bring,” said Andrea Voges, festival program director and manager.

Competing for the Best Feature Film award are: All We Imagine As Light by Payal Kapadia (France, India, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Dear Jassi by Tarsem Singh Dhandwar (India), How To Have Sex by Molly Manning Walker (United Kingdom), Malu by Pedro Freire (Brazil), My Favourite Cake by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha (Iran, France, Sweden, Germany), The Seed Of The Sacred Fig by Mohammad Rasoulof (Germany, France, Iran), Sonti by Terrence Aphane (South Africa), The Story Of Souleymane by Boris Lojkine (France), The Village Next To Paradise by Mo Harawe (Austria, France, Germany, Somalia) and Who Do I Belong To Who by Meryam Joobeur (Tunisia, France, Canada).

Heidi Zwick, Sean Drummond and Pape Boyer will serve as judges, presenting the Best Feature Film and Best South African Feature Film awards. Zwick is a senior programmer at the Sundance Film Festival and has contributed to various Sundance Institute projects for fifteen years. She was a programmer at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival from 2011 to 2014 and is currently a senior programmer at the Provincetown International Film Festival. Pape Boyer co-founded the sales company Funny Balloons in 2002 and co-founded Versatile, a subsidiary of Wild Bunch.

After more than two decades in sales, he decided in 2022 to get closer to filmmakers and founded Black Mic Mac (BMM), a production and packaging company focused on the African continent. A screenwriter and producer known for award-winning films such as Five Fingers, Apocalypse Now and the hit Netflix series Invisible, Drummond served as the founding festival manager and global coordinator of the South African chapter of the shnit Global Short Film Festival for 10 years. As a sought-after story consultant, his portfolio of projects has received accolades and awards at festivals around the world and has also achieved commercial success.

Award-winning producer Antoinette Engel, no stranger to awards herself, is one of the judges for Documentary. In 2023, she won the IDFA DocLab Special Jury Award for Creative Technology for a VR Sandbox experience created by South African artist Natalie Paneng, commissioned by Electric South, of which she served as executive producer. Joining her in the judging is human rights law expert and documentary filmmaker Shameela Seedat, who was the first Film Activist in Residence at the Tshisimani Activist Education Centre in 2019, teaches documentary at the University of Cape Town in 2023, and sits on the board of the Documentary Producers Association. Rounding out the Documentary Jury is Theresa Hill, who has been working in the documentary field for over two decades. She is the Deputy Director of the non-profit organisation STEPS, passionate about the power of documentary to disrupt, change and advance the world around us, and is also the Acquisition Manager for AfriDocs, an exciting online platform for African documentaries.

Best Film

Adrian Van Wyk, Ama Qamata and Tamsin Ranger will present the Best Short Film and Best South African Short Film awards. Their shared experience includes acting, writing, directing, producing, curating and financing films. Van Wyk is a Cape Town-based filmmaker, creative producer and cultural historian who reflects on representations of Cape hip-hop in his research and film. He has been selected as the 2023 Artist-in-Residence at the Singapore Art Museum and his other documentary, Memories of the Soil, recently won the Best International Short Documentary Award at the Regina International Film Festival and Awards, the Best Short Documentary Award at the 30th Ningbo International Short Film Festival in China and the Critics’ Choice Award at the Siberia International Film Festival.

Kamata is best known for her roles as Buller in the TV series Gomora and Pullen Kumalo in the hit Netflix series Blood and Water. In 2011, Tamsin Ranger, head of production at Big World Cinema, joined VanHuay and Kamata. She has produced several independent feature films, documentaries and TV series that have screened at Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Toronto, IDFA and over a hundred other festivals. She is a producer for Al Jazeera English’s Africa Direct documentary series.

Ana Camila Esteves, Jacintha de Nobrega and Khosie Dali will be judging student films at the festival. Ana Camila Esteves is a Brazilian journalist, cultural producer, researcher and film curator, and co-founder, director and curator of Mostra de Cinemas Africanos, an African film festival in Brazil. De Nobrega is one of South Africa’s leading female producers and an alumna of the Los Angeles Film School. She founded Arclight Productions, a film and television production company based in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, and her debut feature won the coveted Best Film and Best Director awards at the Simon Mabunu Sabela Awards in July 2019. Khosie Dali is a filmmaker based in Cape Town, South Africa. As the founder of Miss K Productions, a boutique production company specializing in narrative fiction, she has made significant strides in both the local and international film scene over the past decade. Her feature film Sons of the Sea, a gripping crime thriller, premiered at CineQuest in Los Angeles and won the Best South African Film Award at the 43rd Durban International Film Festival.

In addition to the Best Film Award in each category, Amnesty International Durban will present the Human Rights Award and audiences will have the opportunity to vote for the Audience Choice Award. South African films are also eligible for the Best South African Film Award in each category – Feature Film, Documentary, Short Film and Student Film. The winners will be announced at the Closing Ceremony on 27 July.

“While we are extremely proud of the stellar jury at this year’s festival, we are equally excited to see how audiences use the opportunity to vote for the Audience Choice Awards,” added Vogels.

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