The Crystal Bear for the best short film of the 70th edition of the prestigious Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale 2020) was awarded on Friday evening to the Moroccan film “Clebs” by its director Halima Ouardiri.
The film Clebs presents a “glimpse of a world we’ve never seen before”, said the Festival jury, saying they were “very impressed by the images, light, color and sound”.
“The camera captivated us and put us right in the middle of the action; in the middle of a community, a coexistence, a sense of belonging between hundreds of people,” remark the jury members of this film event, one of the most important in Europe and the world.
“We were able to observe the natural in the unnatural. Life in imprisonment” praised the jury, adding that the film combines “aesthetics and banality” and tells “the story of life and allows us to feel and understand it”.
In “Clebs”, Halima Ouardiri set her camera in a stray dog shelter in Agadir where hundreds of furry animals are housed waiting to be adopted by a family.
Through this film production, the director focuses on the repetitive daily life of all these dogs as an evocation of current human life.
The film presents, through the dogs, a reflection on the lives of millions of human beings in search of a welcoming land.
Halima Ouardiri is a graduate of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal. Her first short film, Mokhtar, won the Canadian Grand Prize at Festival Regard in 2011, while Clebs won the Best Canadian Short Film Award at the Festival international of Francophone Cinema in Acadia in 2019.
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