The jury of filmmakers of the 6th edition of My French Film Festival awarded the Chopard Filmmakers’ Prize to Fabrice Du Welz’ film Alleluia, produced by Panique!.
For its 6th edition, the jury of filmmakers of the online My French Film Festival, chaired by Nicolas Windin Refn (Denmark) and composed of Felix Van Groeningen (Belgium), Valérie Donzelli (France), Marjane Satrapi (France) and David Robert Mitchell (USA), awarded the Chopard Filmmakers’ Prize to Fabrice Du Welz’ film Alleluia, produced by Panique!.
The Filmmakers’ Jury Award is endowed with a prize of € 5,000 for the director, € 5,000 for the producer and € 5,000 for the exporter of the film.
Held between the 18th of January and the 18th of February, MyFrenchFilmFestival.com is a French film festival that takes place only on the web, offering Internet users around the world a chance for a whole month to view a selection of 10 short films and 10 feature films projected in French cinemas in 2015 but yet to be released abroad. Since 2014, two Belgian French-language films (one feature and one short) are included in the selection. This year, Fabrice Du Welz’ Alleluia and Sacha Feiner’s Dernière porte au Sud represented the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. Organised by UniFrance films, the festival’s selection is available in 13 languages: German, English, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, Bulgarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish.
Eager to be part of any new initiative that helps disseminate works from Wallonia-Brussels abroad, in 2014 Wallonie-Bruxelles Images joined forces with UniFrance to offer Belgian films as part of the event.
In total, visitors from 90 countries notched up 6,500,000 viewings (against 60,000 in 2015) in one month on the event’s 40 partner platforms.
Shown for the first time internationally at the Directors' Fortnight in May 2014, Alleluia has been shown at festivals worldwide and come away with numerous awards.
Alleluia is a free adaptation of the American news story better known as the "Honeymoon killers". It plunges us into the maze of destructive passion. Manipulated by a husband whose love is tainted by jealousy, Gloria flees with her daughter and builds a new life for herself away from men and the world. Encouraged by her friend Madeleine, she agrees to meet Michel via a dating website. Michel, the small low-end crook (gigolo by trade), is troubled by this meeting and Gloria falls madly in love. She abandons her daughter and passes herself off as Michel's sister so that he can continue with his scams involving unwitting windows. But the jealousy gradually spreads like gangrene through Gloria...
Alleluia was produced in Belgium by Panique! With the support of the Centre for Cinema and Audiovisual, Wallimage and Tax Shelter.