Cinema Without Borders has announced its jury members to decide the winner of 2020 GoE Bridging The Borders Award at the Lucas International Festival for Young Film Lovers, Germany. Also LUCAS – International Festival for Young Film Lovers programmers, have announced nominees for the Cinema Without Borders’ Bridging The Borders Award sponsored by Go Energistics.
A jury of seven formed by CWB will decide the winning films and at the closing night of the festival, Yeganeh Taheri, CWB Editor in Germany will announce Jury Honorary Mention Film. Then Adam B. Shepherd, President and Chief Executive Officer of Go Energistics, sponsor of our award will announce the winner of the 2020 GeE Bridging The Borders Award in a video message and and the winning filmmaker receives GoE Bridging The Borders Award diploma from Yeganeh Taheri.(It all depends if conditions allows holding a physical award ceremony)
LUCAS – International Festival for Young Film Lovers, is Germany’s oldest festival for young audiences. In 2020 celebrates its 43rd edition this year from September 24th to October 1st. Within the competition sections in the age categories 8+, 13+ and 16+ | Youngsters, LUCAS festival puts its focus on outstanding, international productions of children and youth films, including all film forms from fiction, documentary, to animation and experimental formats.
Cinema Without Borders presents its Bridging The Borders Award, sponsored by Go Energistics for the third time at Lucas International Festival for Young Film Lovers. GoE Bridging The Borders Award Jury members are:
Keely Badgers is Executive Director of MOZAIK, a new millennial-led philanthropic organization committed to exploring and modeling new practices in philanthropy with disruptive, creative, and catalytic potential. Based in Los Angeles, CA, Keely leads the foundation’s strategic grantmaking, programs and community engagements, working with a range of nonprofit organizations in the local, national and international advocacy space.
As a millennial expert and advocate on international human rights and development issues,
Keely pioneers’ durable solutions for underrepresented voices, communities and causes by working to democratize philanthropy through participatory grantmaking praxis.
Massoud BAKHSHI was born in Tehran,Iran,and earned his diploma in photography and filmmaking (IYCS Iranian Young Cinema Society) and his BS in Agronomy engineering (Azad University)
He later studied filmmaking in Italy( NUCT Rome 2000) and the culture financing in France (Dauphine University Paris 2006)
He has worked as a film critic, producer and screenwriter, before making his first documentary films and series in 1997.
Filmography(selected): Tehran Has No More Pomegranates! 2006 feature Doc( selected in more than 100 Int’l film festivals and winner of 10 best film and best director prizes)- BAG DAD BAR BER 2008 short fiction( premiered at Locarno FF leopards of tomorrow, winner of best film in Tampere FF). Our Persian Rug 2010 Documentary, nominated for best mid length documentary at IDFA and magic hour award in Poland. A Respectable Family 2012 Feature, Cannes Film Festival Camera d’or contender; winner of black pearl award in Abudhabi film festival. YALDA a night for forgiveness Feature, 2020 Sundance FF winner of grand jury prize, Berlinale 2020 nominated for Gerneration’s silver bear, Best script award in Sofia FF 2020
Daria Mashouf is Director of Development for MOZAIK, a new millennial led philanthropic organization committed to exploring and modeling new practices in philanthropy with disruptive, creative and catalytic potential.
Based in Los Angeles, CA, Daria is focused on aligning the foundation’s portfolio with its mission and bringing a newfound commitment to Socially Responsible Investing through the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion as well as universal human rights. He bases the foundation of his efforts and guiding principles on promoting social and environmental justice through the arts.
Farah Nabulsi, is a Palestinian-British filmmaker. She left the corporate world in 2016 to start working in the Palestinian film industry as a writer & producer of short fiction films, exploring Palestine related topics that matter to her. This includes Today They Took My Son, endorsed by renowned Director Ken Loach, screened at the United Nations and officially selected to top international film festivals.
Her latest short film The Present, which stars renowned actor Saleh Bakri and qualified for the 2021 Oscars, sheds light on how Palestinians are deprived of the basic right to freedom of movement. It won the Audience Award for Best Film at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2020 (world premiere), the Jury Award for Best Live Action Short at the Cleveland International Film Festival (North American premiere), the Audience Award at the Brooklyn Film Festival and, at Palm Springs International ShortFest, it won the GoE Bridging The Borders Award and Audience Pick.
Adam Shepherd
Adam Shepherd, President and Chief Executive Officer of Go Energistics (GoE), has been a champion for social awareness and strong supporter of numerous non-profit organizations dedicated to healing. As the founder of (GoE) a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), Adam is devoted to serving the men and women of our Nation’s military, Veterans, and their families by supporting the health care systems that serve them.
Adam not only witnessed but experienced first-hand, how people all over the world are eager to connect beyond their borders and despite their [perceived]differences. Continually moved by the spirit of people, Adam actively seeks out opportunities to encourage and enact positive social awareness and change.
Adam’s appreciation for the arts, especially cinema and its power to globally unite people, drives him to serve a higher purpose that goes beyond traditional borders. Adam’s philosophy and core belief that each of us can have a positive impact in our world are echoed through GoE’s sponsorship of the Bridging the Borders Award; which recognizes and highlights those who are most successful in bringing people of our world closer together through film.
Yeganeh Taheri
Yeganeh Taheri, a graduated as a film editor from School of Television and Cinema in 1980 and left Iran for Germany in 1989 where she started her career as a stage actress. Yeganeh’s first performance on stage was with Farhad Majedabadi in A House in a suitcase. This was followed by a few puppet shows for kids in TV with Nargess Vafadar (The stories of Ghandi and his Mother & Jewel Box) and two other acting performance directed by Nilufar Beyzaee (Marjan, Mani and a few small problems & Face to face at the threshold of the cold season).
Yeganeh Taheri approached photography starting a decade ago and her photos shows her keen eyes for picking interesting subjects and compositions. She has covered many different subjects in her photos, including photos from theater performances.
Yeganeh Taheri still lives in Germany and beside photography spends her time on translation of children stories between two languages of Farsi and German.
Bijan Tehrani
Bijan Tehrani a film director, film critic and writer, works as Editor in Chief of Cinema Without Borders while teaching Language & History of film workshops and organizes film screening events and festivals. Bijan has won several awards in international film festivals and book fairs for his short films and children’s books.
For the tenth anniversary of Cinema Without Borders, Bijan has received Ambassador of International Cinema Award from South east European Film Festival, Friend of the Festival Award from Polish Film Festival, LA and Gateway to International Cinema Award from Hungarian Film festival. Bijan Tehrani is recently working on a book of his memoir from Cinema in Iran and a docufiction based on 19th century photographs by Sevruguin, the Russian photographer.
GoE Bridging The Borders Award Nominees
The seven feature films nominated by Lucas International Festival for Young Film Lovers organizers for Bridging The Borders Award are:
Alice Júnior is a transgender youtuber who is carefree and spoiled a lot. After moving with her father to a small town where her new high school seems stuck in time, the young lady has to
survive her new environment with all its prejudice in order to achieve her greatest desire: having her first kiss
Antigone – A straight-A student and model citizen, Antigone oversteps the law when she helps her brother escape from prison. The vice-grip tightens around her as she stands up to authorities: the police, the law, the penal system, and the father of her friend Haemon.
Antigone’s refusal to compromise her personal sense of justice wins the support of her peers, who mobilize on social networks and at colorful protests. Rejecting the offer meant to secure her future, Antigone instead chooses love and loyalty to her immigrant family
ECSTASY – In Clara’s life, the personal and political are intertwined. She lives with her parents in the poor outskirts of São Paulo that are being taken over by organized crime. As her mother becomes an important congresswoman in Brasilia, her family moves to the Federal District. There as Clara feels her mother’s life is
increasingly imperiled, she descends into a downward spiral of self-destruction in which suffering has a life force. The less she eats, the more power and energy Clara feels she has. Starving herself, Clara plunges into a routine based on calculations, repetition, and ritual: she ceases to menstruate and begins to
experience an ecstasy in controlling time. She attempts to devise a geometry of hunger, an impossible theorem where her calculations of destruction at once incite liberation. At the age of 15, with 37 heartbeats per minute and weighing 29 kilos on a body of 1,64 m, Clara is hospitalized. Produced by Petra Costa (THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY) and with an unsettling and electrifying soundtrack
by David Lynch and Lykke Li, ÊXTASE is an immersive exploration of the agony and paradoxical pleasure of anorexia set against the backdrop of the chaotic political landscape of Brasil in the 1990s.
Both a deeply personal journey as well as a collective story of young women and their attempts to control the brutal world around them, director Moara Passoni, co-writer and associate producer on the Oscar® nominated documentary THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY, puts fiction, delirium and reality in a conflicting symbiotic relation.
In my blood it runs – Ten-year-old Dujuan is a child-healer, a good hunter and speaks three languages. As he shares his wisdom of history and the complex world around him we see his spark and intelligence. Yet Dujuan is ‘failing’ in school and facing increasing scrutiny from welfare and the police.
As he travels perilously close to incarceration, his family fight to give him a strong Arrernte education alongside his western education lest he becomes another statistic. We walk with him as he grapples with these pressures, shares his truths and somewhere in-between finds space to dream, imagine and hope for his future self
The Prince’s Voyage – An old Prince runs aground on an unknown shore. Injured and lost, he is found by young Tom and taken in by his parents, 2 scientists who have been exiled from their community because they dared to believe in the existence of other monkey civilisations…
The Prince, guided by his new young friend Tom, discovers with great fascination and enthusiasm this society, even though it is actually quite staid and rigid.
During this time, the two researchers dream of convincing the Academy of the veracity of their previously rejected thesis… Presented in the form of an account, similar to a fable, The Prince’s Voyage is a kind of travel diary set in a world that is quite familiar to us, but very surprising for this old monkey.
Los Lobos: In search of a better life, Max and Leo are taken by their mother, Lucia from Mexico to Albuquerque in the United States. While waiting for her to return from work, the kids listen to tales, rules of conduct and English lessons recorded by Lucia on an old tape recorder. They also build an imaginary universe with their drawings and dream about mom’s promise of going to Disneyland. The director
draws upon his own childhood experiences and tells an emigration story of current explosiveness.
Our Lady of the Niles – Young girls are sent to Our Lady of the Nile, a prestigious Catholic boarding school perched on a hill, where they are taught to become the Rwandan elite. With graduation on the horizon, they share the same dormitory, the same dreams and the same teenage concerns. But throughout the land as well as within the school, deep-seated antagonism is rumbling, about to change these young girls’ lives – and the entire country – forever.