Moko Jumbie

7th Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam

11 - 15 April 2018

Rotterdam, 22 March 2018

For the seventh time, Willemstad will host Curaçao International Film Festival Rotterdam (CIFFR), from Wednesday 11 April through Sunday 15 April 2018. CIFFR presents the highlights of the most recent edition of IFFR, gripping new titles from other film festivals, and promising new work by filmmakers from the region, most importantly in its Yellow Robin Award Competition and the Caribbean Shorts Competition.

This year’s edition opens with Gustav Möller’s thrilling debut The Guilty, which won the Audience Award at IFFR 2018. Main actor Jakob Cedergren will attend the opening. The festival closes with Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool by Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin) with a wonderful role played by Annette Bening. The selection from regional filmmakers includes new work from Curaçao filmmakers Sharelly Emanuelson and Felix de Rooy, among many more.

The Guilty

CIFFR launched in 2012 as a collaboration between the Curaçao-based Fundashon Bon Intenshon and International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). Since then, the festival has served as a platform for young local film talent and has brought feature films, documentaries and short films from all over the world together in Curaçao. 

Festival Director Bero Beyer: “CIFFR offers a wonderful treat: five days of celebrating independent cinema on a beautiful island which has always been a meeting point for many different cultures. The voices represented at the festival range from those of internationally renowned filmmakers to those of emerging local artists, which results in a unique mix of different perspectives and tones. The selection for this seventh edition is as lively and diverse as ever and is sure to open up a world of daring and beautiful film to a wide audience.” 

For the sixth time, CIFFR presents the Yellow Robin Award Competition, in which five films by emerging filmmakers from the Caribbean and Latin America compete for the Yellow Robin Award. This year’s selections are Khalik Allah’s Black Mother (Jamaica, USA), Gustavo Ramos Perales’s El chata (Puerto Rico), Luis and Andrés Rodríguez’s Hijos de la sal (Venezuela), Vashti Anderson’s Moko Jumbie (Trinidad and Tobago, USA) and Álvaro Aponte-Centeno’s El silencio del viento (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, France). An international jury picks the winning film, which is guaranteed a spot in IFFR 2019’s Bright Future programme and will also screen at Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico later in the year. The winning filmmaker receives a cash prize of $2,500 as well as $7,500 worth of training in the context of talent development in programmes such as BoostNL or CineMart.

Black Mother Hijos de la sal

Last year CIFFR introduced the Caribbean Shorts Competition, which returns for its second instalment this year. The programme is the result of a region-wide collaboration. Six film festivals – in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Martinique, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago and CIFFR itself – submitted a short film to enter the Caribbean Shorts Competition. The winning film will later screen at all these festivals.

Besides the competitions, the seventh edition of CIFFR presents a special programme entitled Scenes of Senses that investigates the way film stimulates not just the eye, but our other senses too. There is also an extensive educational programme as well as the recurring Music Call programme featuring music documentaries. Among the twenty or so highlights from IFFR 2018 shown in Curaçao are The Insult by Ziad Doueiri, The Florida Project by Sean Baker and three films that competed in the Hivos Tiger Competition, including the Special Jury Award and HBF Audience Award winner The Reports on Sarah and Saleem by Muayad Alayan.

The Insult The Reports on Sarah and Saleem