Zhu Shengze’s Present.Perfect, a documentary about Chinese live streaming, was presented with the Tiger Award at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).
IFFR’s most prestigious award, the Tiger Award comes with a prize of Euros40,000, which is divided between the filmmaker and producer of the winning film.
Zhu followed a dozen live streamers for ten months to make the film, focusing on marginal but quirky anchors, including a street dancer with a lousy sense of rhythm, a paralysed girl, a middle-aged transvestite and a bored crane driver.
IFFR’s jury described the documentary as “a daring film that takes us to places where we have never been, brings to light characters that want and need to be seen, expanding the language of cinema to a new grammar, using the new found footage of this millennium.”
Other prize winners at this year’s IFFR included Dutch filmmaker Ena Sendijarević, who won the Special Jury Award for Take Me Somewhere Nice; Lebanon’s Nadine Labaki, whose Cannes title Capharnaüm won the BankGiro Loterij Audience Award; and Sweden’s Anna Eborn, who took the VPRO Big Screen Award forTransnistra.
In addition, Aya Koretzky’s A volta ao mundo quando tinhas 30 anos won the Bright Future Award for best feature debut, while the Bright Future jury gave a special mention to Historia de mi nombre by Karin Cuyul.