ECUMENICAL JURY AWARD by INTERFILM and SIGNIS

This award consisting of CHF 5'000 is conferred jointly by two institutions of the churches working in development cooperation, “Action de Carême” (Catholique) and “Bread for All” (Protestant), to the director whose film best reflects the working criteria of the two institutions in the field of North-South cooperation.

The members of the Ecumenical Jury of the 22nd Fribourg International Film Festival were:
Regine Lüthy (Switzerland)
Bernadette Meier (Switzerland)
Jean-Michel Zucker (France) president

The award goes to

El Camino
by Ishtar Yasin, Costa Rica 2008

The award goes to the film El Camino by Ishtar Yasin for the universal nature of the denunciation of the scourge called sexual child abuse and the silence that surrounds it, by showing the courage and the determination of a twelve year old girl and her mute brother. With the sophistication  of the subjective image reflecting the children’s look at the enigmatic adult world, the director tells a true tale without pathos or vain pedagogy, the poetic transposition of which is undertaken with purely cinematic means.

A commendation goes to the film

He Fengming (Fengming,  Chronicle of a Chinese Women)
by Wang Bing, China 2007

For the courageous restitution of half a century of China’s Maoist history with a quite conceptional cinematographic installation that depicts the painful relationship of a women with her personal history that became a daily struggle. The exaltation of the extreme richness of her emotions and notably of her conjugal love adds a particular sparkle to this shattering testimony.