/press release 2019

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The 5th Sydney World Film Festival kicked off this year on April 7 with a full house at the Golden Age Cinema with a selection of great short films from around the globe. The festival ended with again a full house on April 12 at the Palace Central Cinemas with among other the world premiere of 'One More Way To Sink Into My Heart', a beautiful experimental look on a retired couple living in a rural American town.

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During the course of the festival filmgoers could catch 37 feature and short films — selections from among the 1,500 submissions the festival received this year from 45 different countries. Host of the festival John Samaha looks back at a successful edition "this is a rich experience for lovers of film or those just tipping their toes into the world of international cinema, a chance to meet fellow film enthusiasts and broaden your personal horizons".

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The 2019 Sydney World Film Festival prize winners are:

Best Narrative Feature Film: SONGS IN THE SUN (DENMARK) BY KRISTIAN SEJRBO LIDEGAARD. On a hot summer day, Anna visits her childhood friend Julie, on the Danish island Møn, where they both grew up. Julie is obsessed with an old Danish myth and spends all her time in the forest.

Best Documentary Feature Film: ONE MORE WAY TO SINK INTO MY HEART (UNITED STATES) BY KEREN MOSCOVITCH. A filmmaker visits the home of a retired couple living in a rural American town, where they introduce her to their imaginative and quixotic intimate life. Through a series of interviews, short intimate vignettes and sensual environmental video and audio experiments, the viewer is invited down a psychical rabbit hole, through which the secrets of this couple’s happiness are revealed.

Best Narrative Short Film: ELISA (GERMANY) BY KRISTINA KEAN SHTUBERT. 'Elisa' portrays the claustrophobic and extremely painful relationship between nine year old Elisa and her mother.

Best Documentary Short Film: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND PLAYED AT MY HIGH SCHOOL (UNITED STATES) BY ROBERT PIETRI, TONY JANNELLI. This animated documentary is the story of the Velvet Underground's disastrous first public performance.

Best Experimental Film: SALT WATER (UNITED STATES) BY ABE ABRAHAM. Dance-film set to the seismographic recordings of the earth's vibrations.

Best Animated Film: MARFA (UNITED STATES) BY GREG MCLEOD, MYLES MCLEOD. A town on the borderlands of Texas. A desert where strange lights dance in the night sky. A landscape of lost horses, freaks and food trucks. And then there’s the giant lemon. 

Best Underground Film: DIVA & ASTRO (UNITED STATES) BY ANGEL BARROETA. A streetwise posse idly roams the evening in the hood they call home. Diva and Astro follow parallel paths in real time, hurtling irrevocably toward the consequences of the habits they find hardest to overcome.

Best Music Video: NOCTURNES (FRANCE) BY EMMANUEL LEVY. Music Video for the solo EP "Nocturnes" by double bass player Sébastien Beliah

Best Australian Film: MY NAME IS MOHAMED AND RAGHAD, WE DON'T EXIST HERE ANYMORE BY ALI MOUSAWI. A one shot, twelve-minute film about a day in the life of an Iranian- Ahwazi asylum seeker family, surviving in Australia.