FSC-Harvard fellows Paravel & Sniadecki win Locarno film awards

The Film Study Center is pleased to announce that FSC-Harvard fellows Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki have been awarded the Pardo for Best First Feature and the Special CINÉ CINÉMA Jury Prize for their “vilm” (video-film) Foreign Parts at the 63rd annual Locarno Film Festival.

Raised in North and West Africa and the South of France, Verena Paravel is an anthropologist as well as filmmaker. J.P. Sniadecki is a nonfiction filmmaker who is completing his doctorate in Social Anthropology at Harvard.

Foreign Parts is a feature-length, high-definition vilm capturing the changing daily life of a New York City junkyard as the threat of demolition looms. A refuge for the homeless, runaways and hundreds of illegal immigrants, the junkyard conceals a vibrant community that will likely disappear soon due to a city plan to redevelop the area. The film portrays the dying world of an immigrant small-business community; the affective fabric of ties people there have to “their” land; and the body of political, economic and environmental issues that impact their lives.

The Leopard (Pardo) for the Best First Feature Prize is awarded to the best first film screened at the two competitions – the Concorso internazionale and Concorso Cineasti del presente. The Special Jury Prize Ciné Cinéma is for the purchase of the winning film by the French television network Ciné Cinéma to be broadcast on that network.

Production of Foreign Parts was supported by the Film Study Center at Harvard University, the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, and the LEF Moving Image Fund.

About the Film Festival Locarno

This international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946, is one of the longest running, largest, and most prestigious film festivals in the world. Every August, around 180,000 cinema-goers, 1,100 journalists, and 3,400 professionals converge on this small Swiss-Italian town, which becomes the world capital of auteur cinema for eleven days. The Locarno Film Festival is well known worldwide to be a festival of discovery.

About the Film Study Center

The Film Study Center at Harvard University was founded in 1957 for the purpose of supporting work that records and interprets the world in images and sounds. As such it sustains endeavors, from the ethnographic to the experimental, that explore and expand the expressive potential of audiovisual media, especially through nonfiction. FSC-Harvard fellowships are open to Harvard faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral and research fellows. These fellowships include funds as well as access to production equipment, postproduction facilities, technical support, and a community of artistic peers where ideas are exchanged.  www.filmstudycenter.org