Awards

Best of Festival

$5,000 MGLFF BEST FICTION FEATURE sponsored by HBO

Awarded to the Director

$1,500 MGLFF BEST DOCUMENTARY sponsored by HBO

Awarded to the Director

Jury #2 (You Decide)

It’s your Festival. Which film did you think was the best? The film with the highest over-all average score will take the prize in one of the categories listed below. Vote carefully, your vote does count. We will announce the Audience choices and give out the following prizes at our Closing Night Gala Party following the screening of The Chinese Botanists Daughter on Sunday May 6th: $1,000 MGLFF Audience Favorite Award for Best Fiction Feature sponsored by HBO $1,000 MGLFF Audience Favorite Award for Best Documentary sponsored by HBO $500 MGLFF Audience Favorite Award for Best Short sponsored by HBO

Photo: Dale Stine.com Opening Night Gala Reinas/Queens, 2006

There are 64 short films in the Festival this year – will you see them all?
(NOTE: the PlanetOut Short Movie Award winning films are ineligible for audience voting as they have already been declared winners).

The Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, with 14 partner international gay and lesbian film festivals, is officially recognized as a nominating festival for the “Iris Prize”. The prize, valued at $25,000, and generously sponsored by Barcud Derwen and the United Kingdom post production sector, will allow one winning filmmaker to make their next short film in the UK.  The MGLFF Audience Favorite Short will automatically be nominated for this prestigious competition which will be announced October 2007 For more details see www.irisprize.org

$1,000 MGLFF Career Achievement Award 2007
Sponsored by HBO awarded to Eytan Fox for his film The Bubble

Director Eytan Fox, third from left.

THE BUBBLE

Openly gay director Eytan Fox was born in New York on August 21, 1964. At the age of two,his Zionist parents relocated to Israel, and he was raised with his siblings in Jerusalem.

Brought up on a cinematic diet of Francis-Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and especially Robert Altman, Fox was also exposed to a kaleidoscopic range of American musicals as a child. After serving in the Israeli army, he studied at Tel Aviv University’s School of Film and Television where he met his life partner, co-producer and professional collaborator Gal Uchovsky. His body of work includes to date: The Bubble (2006), Walk on Water (2004), Yossi and Jagger (2002), Florentine (an influential Israeli television series 1997), Song of the Siren/Shirat Ha'Sirena (1994) and the short films Gotta Have Heart/Ba'al Ba'al Lev (1997) and Time Off (1990).

Homosexuality in the Israeli army and the ongoing political strife and factional fighting within the Middle-East are recurrent themes in a number of his films. Time Off, his graduating student film, and Yossi and Jagger both explore gay love stories in the army in depth. The true inciting incident of The Bubble, which we are featuring in our 2007 line-up, really commences when Noam, a reserve army officer meets a gorgeous Palestinian named Ashraf at the border checkpoint. Fox’s first full-length film, Song of the Siren, Israel's biggest box-office success in 1994, is a romantic comedy about life in Tel Aviv during the 1991 Gulf War.

In 1997 Fox and Uchovsky created Florentene, a dramatic series for Israeli Television that examined the life of young people in urban Israel against the background of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. The groundbreaking show featured the first gay kiss on primetime Israeli television.

Fox’s mastery of the cinematic art-form, position him as the most influential artist representing gay life in Israel today. His instinct for dramatic storytelling and his ability to weave narrative stories that leave the audience emotionally drained, but nonetheless impacted by the power of his images, place him in the pantheon of truly legendary directors. In past years, the MGLFF has paid tribute to maverick directors Gregg Araki (2005), Francois Ozon (2006) and in 2007 we are incredibly honored to award Eytan Fox with the MGLFF Career Achievement Award, sponsored by HBO.
Fox will be attending the Festival with Gal Uchovsky, his partner and artistic collobarator. Uchovsky shares co-screenwriting and production credit for The Bubble. The MGLFF will pay tribute to Fox prior to the Florida premiere of The Bubble on Saturday May 5th at 9:30pm at the Colony Theatre.

Special thank you to Marcus Hu, Strand Releasing, for facilitating our screening of The Bubble.