By Jeremy Kay
The Miami Film Festival, which elected to continue with virtual judging after cancelling screenings and events towards the end of its 2020 edition in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, has announced its winners.
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Festival executive director and director of programming Jaie Laplante said, “I’m very grateful to all our jurors. This is a time of anxiety and uncertainty for the entire world, and everyone’s personal world is changing dramatically. Yet even while our jurors were dealing with what that all meant for them back in their homes (some of them are as far away as Tbilisi, Montevideo and Seoul), they took the time to continue watching the rest of the films in their sections via secured private links.”
Laplante continued, ”Deliberations were done by Zoom or other similar platforms, and the conversations that the jurors need to have ultimately happened just the way they would of if they had been sitting at dinner together in Miami. My gratitude is for their dedication, and how determined they were to honour the films with their full and serious attention and carefully select those that they felt were most deserving of recognition. In doing so, they helped to bring a sense of closure to the truncated 37th edition of Miami Film Festival.”
The Audience winners were chosen from 45 narrative and 21 documentary feature films in official selection that had screened publicly before the festival’s 37th edition was closed on March 12, three days ahead of the scheduled close.
… the Rene Rodriguez Critics Award to Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas’s White Lie from Canada…