Leading this year’s winners is Ian Hunt Duffy’s ‘Gridlock’, which took home the award for Best Irish Short, having also achieved the Grand Prix Irish Short honour at the Cork Film Festival.
Moe Dunford (Vikings) leads the cast in Hunt Duffy’s directorial debut, which is set during a traffic jam on a country road, and sees a father searching for his child when she goes missing from the car. Peter Coonan (We Have Always Lived in the Castle) and Amy De Bhrun (Jason Bourne) also star.
Both ‘Gridlock’ and ‘Grandma’s Day’ from Milosz Sakowski are eligible for Oscar nominations, with the latter receiving the award for Best International Short.
‘Grandma’s Day’ sees the tables turned on a would-be fraudster who is forced by an elderly woman he tries to scam into pretending to be her grandson, under the threat of exposure.
Other festival highlights include the first NI screening of ‘A United Kingdom’, starring ‘Gone Girl’ actress Rosamund Pike, and celebrations of both Forest Whitaker and Muhammad Ali as part of the BFI and Film Hub NI Black Star Season.
The event line-up also included the From Shorts to Features Conference, at which filmmakers John Maclean (Slow West) and Tony Cranstoun (A Date for Mad Mary) shared insights on their award-winning work.
Winners
- Best Irish Short: ‘Gridlock’, Ian Hunt Duffy
- Runner Up: ‘Pause’, Niamh Heery
- Best International Short: ‘Grandma’s Day’, Milosz Sakowski
- Runner Up: ‘Standby’, Charlotte Regan
- Best Animation: ‘Green Light’, Seongmin Kim
- Runner Up: ‘Way of Giants’, Alois Di Leo
- Best Documentary: ‘Ransacked’, Petur Einarsson
- Runner Up: ‘How to Defuse a Bomb The Project Children Story’ , Des Henderson
Bernie McLaughlin, Foyle Film Festival Director & Programmer:
“We are proud to honour the winning filmmakers of our Oscar®-affiliated Light in Motion awards. We’ve been privileged this year to enjoy a really impressive array of short films, documentary features and short animations from around the world.
“I’d like to thank all our competitors for sharing their work at Foyle Film Festival and we wish them all the very best in their careers going forward.”