The Jerusalem Film Festival which took place July 5-14, awarded the Latin American films Aquí y allá / Here and There by Antonio Méndez Esparza, El lugar más pequeño / The Tiniest Place by Tatiana Huezo and Papirosen (pictured) by Gastón Solnicki with special prizes.
The debut feature by Méndez Esparza, Aquí y Allá / Here and There, received the The Nathan Cummings Foundation Award, in the amount of $5,000 USD. According to the jury, the film "captures with immediacy and authenticity the rituals and demands of daily rural life. With a focus on one Mexican family, using nonprofessional actors, it touches on the global issue of unemployment, giving voice to those usually not heard." The Ostrovsky Family Foundation Award with a cash prize of $2,000 was presented to Huezo's documentary feature El lugar más pequeño / The Tiniest Place. "The large-scale massacre of El Salvadorans beginning in 1979 is evoked in this film by present-day witnesses. Layers of memory emerge from individual as well as collective details, while sounds, images of nature, and voices beautifully construct a coherent political point of view," wrote jury composed by film programmer and producer Violeta Bava; Annette Insdorf, director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia, and Erez Pery, artistic director of the Cinema South Festival.
Additionally, the Argentine film Papirosen by Solnicki received the Lia Award, presented by the Joan Sourasky-Constantiner Holocaust Multimedia Research Center of the Jerusalem Cinematheque, in the amount of $3,000 USD.
