Another year, another Iris. And it was as big and beautiful and wonderful as previous years. Reviews of individual shorts and features, as seen by this writer, will be available below in due course. But Buzz had plenty of involvement in the Prize this time was privileged to put together the Audience Award for Best British Short Film.
That meant that, alongside the jury-picked winner, the audiences themselves were able to vote for their favourite British Short Film. In this case, there was a fair amount of similarity between the audience choices and the judges’ choices. Of the three shortlisted British shorts – Wren Boys, Ladies Day and Beyond – There’s Always a Black Issue Dear, two were also in the top three amongst the audience prize. Ladies Day came third, with Bachelor, 38 coming second, and the Buzz Audience Award winner was Wren Boys.
Beyond won Best British from the jury – interestingly considering that it did reasonably well amongst the audience in voting but not amazingly so. Elsewhere, Mrs. McCutcheon won the Youth Jury prize. Of the Feature Film awards, with Buzz’s Emma Clark on the Jury, 1985 won both best feature and best female performance for Jamie Chung. Best male performance went to Felix Maritaud for Sauvage, a stunning depiction of a gay prostitute on the streets of France.
The Iris Prize itself, the highlight of the night, came down to a shortlist of Wren Boys (again, marking a clean sweep of podiums for its director Harry Lighton), Pre-Drink and Three Centimetres. In the end, the last of those three, directed by Lara Zeidan took home the big prize, giving her £30,000 with which to put together her next film. If it’s anything like as strong as Three Centimetres, Zeidan’s career will be one to watch.
Reviews of the shorts here
Reviews of the features here