{"id":109076,"date":"2015-10-05T22:37:57","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T04:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/international-film-fest-thrills-cortez-crowds\/"},"modified":"2015-10-05T22:37:57","modified_gmt":"2015-10-06T04:37:57","slug":"international-film-fest-thrills-cortez-crowds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/international-film-fest-thrills-cortez-crowds\/","title":{"rendered":"International film fest thrills Cortez crowds"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The
The Manhattan Short Film Festival crowned the German-made \u201cBis Gleich\u201d as its Gold Medal winner Monday.<\/span>Photo courtesy of Manhattan Short Film Festival<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Announced on Monday, the Gold Medal winning film in the 18th Annual Manhattan Short Film Festival was \u201cBis Gleich.\u201d The 15-minute German film, which translates to \u201cUntil Then,\u201d was a powerful film about an elderly woman who went out of her way to ensure an ailing neighbor maintained his perspective on life.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s leading actor, Horst Westphal, also won the festival\u2019s Best Actor award.<\/p>\n

Helping to determine Best Film and Best Actor awards was a near sold-out crowd at the Sunflower Theatre in downtown Cortez on Saturday. Those in attendance joined thousands of other international film lovers from cinemas in New York, Moscow, Cape Town, London, Mumbai and Buenos Aires to view and vote on the 10 finalists selected for the annual Manhattan Short Film Festival.<\/p>\n

Upon entering their respective cinemas, viewers were provided an official voting card to select their favorite film and actor. Ballots were subsequently sent to Manhattan Short\u2019s New York City headquarters were they were tabulated.<\/p>\n

\u201cCortez needs more events like this,\u201d said local resident Michael Billy, who attended the nearly three-hour screening.<\/p>\n

The Sunflower Theatre audience on Saturday agreed. Joanie Fraughton, executive director of the annual Durango Film Festival, said she wanted to bring the Manhattan Film Festival to Cortez in order to judge the community\u2019s response with regard to holding future film events.<\/p>\n

\u201cWould you come out and support an event if we brought over the best of films screened at the Durango Film Festival?\u201d Fraughton posed as the audience responded with cheers and a raucous round of applause.<\/p>\n

Based on the crowd\u2019s applause and cheers, the Cortez favorite Manhattan Short at Saturday\u2019s screening was \u201cGrounded,\u201d a 19-minute French film. The short film revealed the impossible tale of a ticket agent who went beyond her duties to ensure a woman made an airline flight to attend her mother\u2019s funeral.<\/p>\n

Another audience favorite was \u201cDad\u2019s in Mum.\u201d The laugh-out-loud, 6-minute French short provided audience members with an innocent look at \u201chanky-panky\u201d from a child\u2019s perspective.<\/p>\n

Earning the festival\u2019s Silver Award for best film was \u201cShok.\u201d Based on a true story, the 20-minute tragedy centered around betrayal and redemption from the perspective of two boys in war-torn Kosovo in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

The festival\u2019s third place award for best film was \u201cBear Story,\u201d a heart-warming, animated 10-minute tale from Chile about a bear that was enslaved to work at a circus.<\/p>\n

Other finalists screened at the festival included \u201cListen,\u201d a disturbing 13-minute short about an Arab woman who found herself victim to domestic violence in Denmark.<\/p>\n

\u201cForever Over\u201d was an outrageous 14-minute short from Germany about a woman scorned after she attempted to spice up her love life.<\/p>\n

\u201cSundown,\u201d a 15-minute short from Turkey, revealed the shock and grief experienced by a woman after finding her mother dead.<\/p>\n

Another animated short, \u201cPatch,\u201d was a bizarre; yet Cortez crowd-pleasing 3-minute film from Switzerland that utilized time-lapse photography to portray a man running to catch a train.<\/p>\n

\u201cEl Camino Solo,\u201d which translates to \u201cThe Lonely Road,\u201d was a 12-minute American film about a stranded motorist who discovers the kindness in strangers.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s Manhattan Short Film Festival, a celebration of the short film genre, received a record-breaking 678 entries from 52 countries.<\/p>\n

The annual festival started with a projector and the side of a truck parked on Mulberry Street in New York City in 1998.<\/p>\n

tbaker@the-journal.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Manhattan Short Film Festival crowned the German-made \u201cBis Gleich\u201d as its Gold Medal winner Monday.Photo courtesy of Manhattan Short Film Festival Announced on Monday, the Gold Medal winning film in the 18th Annual Manhattan Short Film Festival was \u201cBis Gleich.\u201d The 15-minute German film, which translates to \u201cUntil Then,\u201d was a powerful film about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":109077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5961,5843],"tags":[21,2661],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-109076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-entertainment","category-living","tag-cortez","tag-film-festival"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109076"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=109076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}