The awards for the different categories in competition at this year's edition of Curtas Vila do Conde were presented on Saturday, July 20th. The selections were made by the various juries of the sections and by votes from the festival attendees.

– INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Grand Prix [DCN Beers]

THAT'S HOW I LOVE YOU, Mário Macedo

Juri Statement: To a film that constructs itself from a subtle and intelligent approximation to a kid and his environment, building tension in a world where tenderness and cruelty can coexist by allowing time in to let us notice growing up and how love emanates. It´s a playful film that brought us joy and will remain with us and with the audience we shared the screening with, the jury had no doubt about giving the Grand Prix to THAT´S HOW I LOVE YOU, by Mário Macedo. That´s how we love a film!

Best Animation

LICK A WOUND, Nathan Ghali

Juri Statement: A film that surprised us in its playfulness by exploring every possibility in the medium and our perceptions of reality and artificiality.

Best Documentary

VERY GENTLE WORK, Nate Lavey

Juri Statement: Conveying cinematic tools to investigate the images produced. In this gesture, collective history merges into the landscape and is imprinted.

Best Fiction

PANADRILO, Marcela Heilbron

Juri Statement: Funny and wild, this surprisingly different immigrant story addresses the complexities of this reality in a very intelligent way. Its humour is sharp and politically instigating.

Audience Award [Fricon]

YUCK!, Loïc Espuche

European Film Awards Candidate

THAT HOW I LOVE YOU, Mário Macedo

– PORTUGUESE COMPETITION

Best Film [Portuguese School of Arts, Universidade Católica do Porto + Pixel Bunker]

RINHA, Rita M. Pestana

Juri Statement: Entering straight into the intimacy of a character, and into the path to find her own way in life. In each frame we sense the love in the portrayal, revealing a strong and caring woman. Through rigorous and organic shots – beautiful and tactile, both by standing still or driving the streets - in a cleverly-edited film.

Best Director [Pulsar Studios]

DAVID PINHEIRO VICENTE for THE HUNTERS

Juri Statement: In an almost perfectly absurd mise-en-scéne, the ways for decadence are welcomed in a feast of light. A fresh take on cinema that inscribes itself in a certain history of film, while opening doors to new possibilities, narratives and images in this realm. We are looking forward to see the next film by this director.

Audience Award [SPA - Portuguese Society of Authors]

PERCEBES, Alexandra Ramires, Laura Gonçalves

— EXPERIMENTAL COMPETITION

Best Film [Centro de Arte Oliva]

MAN NUMBER 4, Miranda Pennell

Juri Statement: The experimental section prize goes to a work of apparent simplicity, formally very precise and rigorous, which contradicts the usual distance from digital media we use to daily relate to the world. It uses digital to create a grammar based on larger names in contemporary visual culture, creating a language that tests the limits of representation. In addition to shedding light on an already long history of oppression and horror that is constantly silenced, the work manages, in an exemplary way, to bring us all inside, signalling the daily processes that make us accomplices, conscious or not, of this type of situations. This film shows how the off-field does not exist, how there is no outside and how we are all part of the problem or solution.

Honourable Mention

THERE IS GOLD EVERYWHERE, Rita Morais

Juri Statement: We decided to attribute an honourable mention to a powerful and subtle film that looks at a history with more than two thousand years, pointing out, yesterday as today, the relationship between extractivism and environmental destruction of social-natural landscapes, basing this type of processes on extended dynamics resulting from colonial projects.

— TAKE ONE! COMPETITION

Best Film [Showreel + IPDJ + Restart]

SLIMANE, Carlos Pereira

Juri Statement: A film supported by the mastery of the grammar of cinema, which rises in the remarkable final sequence of the protagonist in catharsis, based in a dystopian place, still anchored in honesty and in the tension returned by bodies.

Best Director

CAROLINA ROSENDO for A SOLO

Juri Statement: A Catholic school is the place of a sensitive dramaturgy that relates the insecurities of experiencing the world with an adolescent body and the symbolic weight of Christian iconography.

— MUSIC VIDEOS COMPETITION

Best Film

CONFERÊNCIA INFERNO, FANTASIAS by PEDRO FONSECA, VASCO RAFAEL CARVALHO

Juri Statement: The very intense narrative transported us into an urban daily life marked by metamorphoses and banalities associated with a synth-pop musicality of dancing cadences.

It also presents, in its direction, clear elements of a very subsidiary do-it-yourself culture of an intense 1980's Porto post-punk. It is, clearly, a local and trans-local video, where we emphasise its great originality, ingenuity, and the desire to make a difference.

— MY GENERATION COMPETITION

Best Film [Auto Bemguiados]

T-ZERO, Daniel Roque, Vicente Nirō

— CURTINHAS

Best Film [Associação Comercial do Porto]

THE MYSTERY OF MISSING SOCKS, Oskar Lehemaa

Honourable Metion M/3

BAKING WITH BORIS, Maša Avramović

Honourable Metion M/6

THE GRAND MOTHER, Julia Hazuka

Honourable Metion M/9

YUCK!, Loïc Espuche