Tirador wins special award in Berlin Film Festival

Brillante “Dante” Mendoza’s latest feature film Tirador (Slingshot) won the Caligari Film Prize from the Berlin International Film Festival last week. This is the second international award for Tirador after the Special Jury Award it won in Marrakech last December.

According to the Berlinale website, “the Caligari Film Prize, three-person jury awards the Caligari Film Prize to a film in the Forum. The prize is sponsored by the German Federal Association of Communal Film Work and Filmdienst magazine. The winning film is honoured with 4,000 Euros, half of which is given to the director, the other half is meant to fund distribution. The 2008 jury: Andreas Heidenreich, Dagmar Kamlah, Julia Teichmann.”

Tirador is the first Filipino film to be shown in Forum to win the special award.

Director Mendoza with Coco Martin, yours truly, the film’s executive producer and creative consultant Armando Lao attended the festival from Feb. 8 to 13.

Aside from Tirador, four other Filipino films screened in the Forum section were Jim Libiran’s Tribu (Tribe);  Mes de Guzman’s Balikbayan Box; Khavn dela Cruz’s The Muzzled Horse of an Engineer in Search of Medical Saddles; and John Torres’ Years When I Was a Child Outside. Libiran, Dela Cruz and Torres presented their films in Berlin.

It was the first time that Berlin has featured five films from Filipino filmmakers.

Tirador has been previously sold to Peccadillo Pictures for UK and Ireland. France’s Swift Distribution has acquired the French’s broadcast and video rights. In Berlin, however, its theatrical company Equation has added the theatrical rights for the film. Negotiations are underway for possible distribution in North America and Germany.

Tirador will compete at the Singapore and Indianapolis International Film Festivals in April where the major winner will receive North American distribution by Film Movement and at the Cines del Sur in Granada, Spain in June.

Aside from Martin, Tirador stars Jiro Manio, Kristoffer King, Nathan Lopez with the special participation of Jaclyn Jose, Simon Ibarra and Julio Diaz. Ralston Joel Jover wrote the script. The movie was produced by Centerstage productions.

The Film Development Council headed by chairman Jacky Atienza, festival committee chairperson Christine Dayrit and executive director Lali Suzara subsized the trip to Berlin of the Filipino delegation.