The winners of the Arte France Cinema Award and the Prince Claus Film Fund Grant were announced last night at the CineMart 2010 Closing Night Party.
Anocha Suwichakornpong's By the Time It Gets Dark was awarded the Prince Claus Fund Film Grant of €15,000. The jury, chaired by documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak, was impressed by the “unconventional episodic storytelling” of Suwichakornpong's proposal – a highly personal take on contemporary Thailand.
The award, now in its tenth year, is given to a CineMart project by a filmmaker from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Caribbean, to support early-stage development. Anocha Suwichakornpong's feature debut, Mundane History, is also competing the IFFR 2010 Tiger strand.
Pia Marais' Layla Fourie received the Art France Cinema Award for the best CineMart 2010 Project. The drama, written by Marais (who won a 2007 Tiger for her debut Die Unerzogenen), is set in present-day South Africa and revolves around a single mother who works as a polygraphist in a casino. The €10,000 prize is intended to support the production of independent filmmaking.