On Friday 26th June the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival (CBFF) streamed the announcing the this year's Award Winners via Facebook.
Now in it 9th year the festival has grown from very humble beginning when it received only 30 entries in its first year to this year's record of over 1,100 films from more than 70 countries.
With all the festival's judges all drawn from the creative industries CBFF has gained a reputation for supporting grassroots indie film both in its home country of Wales as well as worldwide. It 16 categories attract both short films and features, fiction films and documentaries, animations, poetic and experimental and; films for the newly added drone and smart phone categories.
This year has even seen the submission of films featuring movies stars such as Timothy Spall, Susan Sarandon, Mari Nishio and Anna Friel.
Normally over 100 films are screened during the festival, as well as other special events Q&As and of course the Awards Ceremony; all taking place at the wonderful Ffwrnes Theatre, Llanelli, South Wales.
Unfortunately this year, due to the Covid Crisis, none of this has been possible.
So what was to be done?
As a BAFTA Cymru and IMDb qualifying festival it was important that the show must go on and the CBFF team has worked tirelessly to ensure that the Awards Nominations were announced and streamed via the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival Facebook page on the May 25th and received over 4ooo views.
The CBFF2020 Award Winners were then announced on Friday, 26th June:
Best Celtic Short: Pale Saint - Rhys Marc Jones
Best Drone: Around The Circle - Guillaume Palmantier
Best Short Comedy: Princess for Hire - Sarah Elgood
Best Short Documentary: Ambazonia - Jonny Pickup
Best Animation: How Countries Fight Their Wars - Thomas Loopstra & Maurice Baltissen
Best Foreign Short: Ismail's Dilemma - Dhimitri Ismailaj
Best No Budget Short: To Trend on Twitter - Andy Wooding
Best Experimental: I? - Pengcheng Li
Best Feature Documentary: Barkley: Sadistic Race - Linda Sanders
Best Feature Film: Terrolun and Lunlun - Hiroyuki Miyagawa
Best Smart Phone: By Numbers - Hazal Aztekin
Best Short Film Made in Wales: Showdown - Lewis Carter & Kristian Kane
Best Poetic Film: Write Me - Pearl Gluck
Rising Star (Under 21s): Toffee - Eden Quine Taylor
Best Faith: Sower - Paul Syrstrad
Best Short Film: Backwards - Marco Augelli
https://www.facebook.com/carmarthenbayfilmfestival/
