Edmond Was a Donkey, Gravity of Center take short film awards

Edmond Was a Donkey (Edmond Était Un Âne) (pictured) and Gravity of Center were among the Canadian festival jury prize winners, announced at the Worldwide Short Film Festival awards picnic Sunday.

Edmond was a Donkey, directed by Franck Dion, took the Bravo!FACT award for best Canadian short, an award that includes a $5000 cash prize.

The 14-minute Canada-France co-production, produced by the NFB and France’s Papy3D and Arte France, also won the Special Jury Award in the short film category at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival last week.

Gravity of Center, directed by Thibaut Duverneix, won for best experimental short, and Christophe Collette took the Kodak award for best cinematography in a Canadian short for the 14-minute film.

Elsewhere, U.K.-India co-production Unravel, a 14-minute short doc directed by Meghna Gupta, won the audience award.

And Tanya Lemke’s STATIC won the WSFF’s Screenplay Giveaway Prize, a $50,000 in-kind prize for goods and services to support turning her script into a short film.

Other winners were Brazilian Aly Muritiba’s The Factory (A Fabrica), which took the Deluxe award for best live-action short; French short My Sweetheart (Mon Amoureux), for which lead actor Miss Ming received the Deluxe award for best performance in a live-action short; U.K. director Sebastian Feehan’s Eighty Eight, which took the Panasonic Award for best documentary short; and six-minute Australian short The Maker, directed by Christopher Kezelos, which won best animated short prize.

This year’s Worldwide Film Festival jury was comprised of Shane Smith, TIFF Bell Lightbox director of public programmes, filmmaker Iain Gardner, Susanne Folkesson, UR acquisition exec, filmmaker Ian Harnarine and filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée (Café de Flore).