Fanie Fourie's Lobola wins US award

14 Mar 2013

Fresh from its excellent opening weekend performance at the box office, South African romantic comedy Fanie Fourie's Lobola has won the Audience Choice Award for Best Comedy at the 19th Annual Sedona International Film Festival, a nine-day festival held recently in Arizona.

Touted as a celebration of the best in independent film from around the world, the Sedona festival includes features, shorts, documentaries, animation and foreign films. It has been recognised by filmmakers and audiences as one of the top festivals in the world and named the "Fest to Impress" by MovieMaker Magazine. The film festival honours filmmakers motivated by passion for their art and driven by a love for making timely, moving and important films.

This year, the festival screened 145 films. "To win the Audience Award for Best Comedy against the level of competition at Sedona is a huge accolade for Fanie Fourie's Lobola, said the film's producers, Lance Samuels and Kweku Mandela of Out of Africa Entertainment. "This is a highly regarded festival and the audience award is widely recognised as one of the most important awards of any festival, because the winning film is selected by the audience attending the festival, rather than by a few members of a festival jury. This is the second audience award that the film has won, following the Jozi Film Festival Audience Award in February."

Among the best harbingers of a film's success

Helen Kuun of Indigenous Film Distribution, which released the film in cinemas in South Africa, said it's worth noting that Academy Award-winner Tsotsi won the Audience Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the People's Choice Award at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival in the same year. "Another independent film that followed a similar course and was hugely popular with audiences was New Zealand's Whale Rider, which won the World Cinema Audience award at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and continued to rake in Audience Choice Awards in the year that followed."

"Audience awards are among the best harbingers of a film's success, because they are decided on by regular cinema-goers and are an accurate reflection of the mood of the time and what people are enjoying and are interested in seeing on screen," added Henk Pretorius, director of Fanie Fourie's Lobola.

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