The sixth edition of the four-day Atlas Workshops of the Marrakech International Film Festival (FIFM) closed on Thursday (November 30) with the presentation of eight awards representing total cash prizes €126,000
The three prizes for films in post-production went to Meryam Joobeur’s Motherhood (€30,000), Mo Harawe’s The Village Next To Paradise (€20,000) and Mia Bendrimia’s The Magma (€10,000).
Motherhood is the anticipated feature debut of Oscar-nominated Tunisian-Canadian filmmaker Joobeur and is produced by Sarra Ben Hassen of Tunisia’s Instinct Blue.
Somalian filmmaker Harawe’s The Village Next to Paradise is also a feature debut, and is being produced by Sabine Moser and Oliver Neumann of Austria’s FreibeuterFilm.
The Magma from French-Algerian filmmaker Bendrimia is a documentary produced by France’s Kira Simon-Kennedy.
The post-production jury was comprised of Ava Cahen, artistic director of Cannes’ Critics’ Week, Egyptian producer Mohamed Hefzy of Film Clinic and Moroccan director Meryem Benm’Barek.
Four development prizes were awarded to Palestinian director Dima Hamdan’s Amnesia (€30,000), Halima Ouardiri’s The Camel Driving School (€20,000), Rokhaya Marieme Balde’s The Passion Of Aline (€5,000) and Fradique’s Hold Time For Me.
Danish producer Katrin Pors of Snowglobe Film, Qatar-based Metafora producer Fayçal Hassaïri and Sarah Chazelle, a distributor and sales representative for both Jour2Fête and The Party Film Sales in France, comprised this jury.
Amnesia is Hamdan’s fiction feature debut and is being produced by Tony Copti of Palestine’s Fresco Films.
Canadian-Moroccan filmmaker Ouardiri’s The Camel Driving School is produced by France’s Margaux Juvénal, Nicolas Eschbach and Maud Leclair Névé of Indie Prod and Take Shelter.
In addition, the ArteKino International Prize was presented to Sammy Baloji, an artist and filmmaker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His project, Il Padre Selvaggio, a fiction film in development, is an adaptation of the eponymous work by Pier Paolo Pasolini, produced by Rosa Spaliviero, of Belgium’s Twenty Nine Studio & Production.
Over four days the Atlas Workshops brought together 300 international professionals with 25 projects and films made by a rising generation of Moroccan, Arab, and African filmmakers. They included 16 projects in development and nine films in production or post-production from 11 countries. The participants benefited from tailor-made support through more than 110 mentoring sessions with script, production, distribution, editing and music consultants.
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