Sanfic Industry Awards: “Cachorra”, “Diamond”, “Shifting Times”.

Chile’s premier industry forum, Sanfic Industria, closed Friday 19th August with a plethora of awards given to projects from across Latin America and Spain.

Still rocked by the pandemic, Season 11 is…^th Year saw another hybrid edition but a significant increase in attendance. The different sections included WIP Ibero-American, Santiago Lab: Fiction and Documentary, Sanfic-Mórbido Lab, Sanfic Series and the new space created for female producers, Productoras Lab.

Most significantly, this year a number of projects from small countries and by women directors, as well as emerging new talent, triumphed at the forum.

Yashira Jordan’s feature debut, Bolivian drama Diamond, which follows an indigenous trap-singing teenager searching for his estranged father, took home the most awards in the Santiago Lab Fiction section with three awards including BDC co-production assigned home.

Indigenous filmmaker Leyzer Chiquin’s Kicks of Soil from Guatemala and A Woman Wants to Die, a second feature film by Chilean director Constanza Figari, each won two prizes.

At the Santiago Documentary Lab, the docu-fiction hybrid Erratic Blocks (Bloques Erraticos), the first feature-length documentary by Thomas Woodroffe, best known for his acclaimed shorts Austral Fever and Holding Desire, scooped three awards. He was recently recognized at the Cannes Marché du Film, where he won, among others, the Pop Up Film Residency Award at Short Film Corner and before that the Le Lokal award at the Cinélatino-Rencontres de Toulouse.

Doc follows the ghost of photographer Lucien Le Saint after he is freed from a Patagonian glacier. Disoriented, he follows the same route as 100 years ago, stopping at places where he filmed the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego.

The Sanfic-Morbido Lab awards were dominated by “Cachorra,” a darkly funny Mexican horror thriller set on the US-Mexico border from Machete’s Edher Campos. Cachorra is the feature film debut of Madrid-based writer and consultant Elisa Puerto Aubel, who wrote the Sitges Audience Award-winning La venganza de Jairo. It takes place in the border town of Mexicali, where zoo veterinarian Clara Vásquez is brought a female wolf cub, with whom she immediately bonds. Strange things happen and wild wolves appear to reclaim the cub.

That The new Productoras Lab saw three awards split evenly between Peru’s “Her Ocean” (“El Mar, La Mar”), produced by Maria Paz Barragan with Helmer scribe Julian Amaru; “Fan” by Mariela di Naro from Argentina and “Laureano” from Peru by Jaisia ​​Figueroa, directed by Claudia Capatinta.

Among the 10 Works in Progress (WIP), the biggest winner was Chilean Alberto Hayden’s debut feature film “A Dark Light” (“Una luz negra”), produced by Joaquin Echeverria and Benja Pinto. Hayden’s tale of two adults, a woman grieving the loss of her son and the younger man, who bears the son’s name and bears an uncanny resemblance, won Yagan Films’ coveted $8,000 post-production sound award and guaranteed participation in the Malaga WIP.

Colombian TV series trumped rivals in Sanfic Industria’s growing TV sidebar, with Shifting Times (‘Tiempos Mutantes’) claiming three awards including accreditation in key markets of Conecta Fiction & Entertainment in Spain, BAM in Colombia and Series Mania in France. Another Colombian series, “God Level” (“Nivel Dios”), won participation in Spain’s Filmmarket Hub, an online hub for feature films and series in development.

Set in a violent period in Colombia’s history, Shifting Times is a Colombian-British production that follows an emerging British music producer who delves deep into the country’s underground music scene.

“God Level” (“Nivel Dios”) centers on two brothers whose shared passion for hip-hop music allows them to escape from their everyday lives.

Sanfic Industria ran from August 11th to 19th.