Aurora Award

The Anchorage International Film Festival is adding a new award category this year as a way to acknowledge, honor and encourage feature film submissions that are unconventional in their subject matter and storytelling techniques. We want filmmakers who experiment with idiosyncratic approaches to movie making to know they can find an audience for their work here in Anchorage every winter. We are calling it the Aurora Award and each year it will be given to a movie and its creators that exemplifies boundary-pushing and risk-taking, creativity and originality.

The winners of our main awards competition will be announced on Sunday, December 11. The winner in each of the main categories will screen at venue (TBA) the week following the festival. However, in conjunction with our new Aurora Award the AIFF will start a tradition by announcing this award winner prior to the start of the festival.

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The 2011 AIFF Inaugural Aurora Award goes to Israeli filmmaker, Assaf Tager, in recognition of his debut feature length movie, Andante. Andante is a beautiful, stylish and finely crafted meditation on the role that the human imagination (or in Tager’s near-future dystopia, it’s absence) plays in the shaping of societies. Tager’s venture into the realm of philosophical science fiction is a radical departure from the usual socio-historical preoccupations of the Israeli filmmaking community. Inspired in part by the writings of two disparate 20th century thinkers (Freud and Pessoa) this movie will appeal primarily to admirers of experimental cinema.

— Bruce Farnsworth, 2011 Aurora Award Jury Foreman