By Oliver Bradley
BERLIN—Noa Regev, head of Jerusalem’s iconic Cinemateque joins the jury that will award the GWFF Best First Feature Award – during the Berlin International Film Festival
Regev will be joined by Italian filmmaker Jonas Carpignano and Rumanian director Călin Peter Netzer.
The jury trio will choose a winner from a selection of 15 debut feature films from the sections Competition, Panorama, Forum, Generation and Perspektive Deutsches Kino that are competing for the award – including Tsivia Barkai Jacov‘s Israeli feature Para Aduma (Red Cow).
Para Aduma is a coming of age film portraying the life of a 17 year Jewish girl growing up in a religious enclave surrounded by an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem.
It will be screened in the Berlinale’s Generation Section – a division of the festival devoted to films whose protagonists are children and teens – thus making it also a contender for Generation’s top prize, the Crystal Bear.
The world premiere of Para Aduma is scheduled for February 18.
The Berlinale introduced the First Best Feature Award in 2006 as a means of recognizing and supporting next-generation filmmakers. The award is endowed with 50,000 Euros, funded by GWFF – the Association for the Recognition of Film and Television Rights (Gesellschaft zur Wahrnehmung von Film- und Fernsehrecht), a filmmakers’ union dedicated to safeguarding film and television rights.
Noa Regev has been the executive director of the Jerusalem Cinematheque since 2013. This position also includes heading the Israel Film Archive as well as the Jerusalem Film Festival, which under her direction has grown in size and significance, both nationally and internationally. Prior to taking up her duties in Jerusalem, she headed the Tel Aviv International Student Film Festival and the Holon Cinematheque.
The winners of both the Crystal Bear and GWFF First Best Feature Award will be announced at the Berlinale’s gala prize ceremony on Saturday February 24. The prize money of the First Best Feature Award gets split evenly between the producer and the director of the winning film.