Fresh Film Festival 2017 Junior Category Awards

Seán Treacy, 1st place winner of the Fresh Film Festival 2017 Junior Category, pictured with his family at the Odeon Cinema, Castleytroy. Picture: Katie Glavin/ilovelimerick

Fresh Film Festival 2017 Junior Category Awards

March 29, 2017, saw the first of two-day awards as part of the Fresh Film Festival, The Fresh Film Festival Junior Category Awards. The Fresh Film Festival is a national film competition for budding young Stephen Spielbergs and Kathryn Bigelows aged 7-18 which is running in Limerick City all this week.

The Fresh Film Festival Founded in 1997 as part of the Limerick Film Festival as the Irish School’s Video Competition. Fresh Film Festival was originally a school’s video competition for secondary students. It has since expanded to a year-round organisation with a focus on national and international filmmakers spanning the primary and secondary aged groups. The Fresh Film Festival has grown in response to the increasing numbers of entries they receive and the ‘Ireland’s Young Filmmaker Awards’ now consist of three sections, junior which is aged 7-12, Senior aged 12-18, and The International Young Filmmaker Awards. Each section is open to individual filmmakers, schools, youth and community groups in these age categories.

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Having had special events like workshops for schools and public screenings of international feature-length documentaries with lots more in between, Wednesday, March 29 and Thursday, March 30th sees the culmination of hard work from many schools, groups and individuals all over the country, including some cross-border entries. The Fresh Film Festival 2017 Junior Category finalists were picked from a huge amount of initial submissions through jury selection and audience choice votes. These were held at screenings up and down the country, when Fresh Film visited Galway, Cork, Dublin and back here in Limerick to showcase to a huge number of schools and individuals a wide variety of the entries the Fresh Film Festival 2017 received from the different regions.

They are all short films of no more than a couple of minutes each, on any topic, style or genre. They can be live-action or animation, comedy or drama, fiction or documentary, romantic or horror. There are schools entering with small groups or entire classes, there are youth clubs and various other regional organisations who have submitted films, and the Fresh Film Festival 2017 are also really proud to say that there are a number of really fantastic individual projects submitted by independent young filmmakers.

The Winners on March 29 under the Junior category were announced after screenings of the entrant’s short films in the Odeon Cinema, Castletroy. The Fresh Film Festival had the pleasure of welcoming Vlad Mare of VladTeeVee, a local Limerick teen who recently hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube, who announced the winners on the day. Maria Ní Mhurchín and Peter McAvoy also took to the stage on the day to announce the winner of the Radharc Trust Award for the best documentary.

This year’s winners of the Fresh Film Festival 2017 Junior Category are:

1st Place

Blood, Sweat and Tears – Sean Treacy, Wicklow

2nd Place

Oscar and the Return of the Salmon of Knowledge – Trinity and Eden Minihan, Co. Clare

3rd Place

The Easter Raid – 4th Class, Donoughmore National School, Limerick

 Highly Commended

Open Call for Best Friend – Trading Faces Film School, Galway

Anyone for Cappuccino? – Our Lady of Mercy National School Bantry, Co. Cork 

The Polar Express – Corpus Christi Primary School, Limerick

Grace – 3rd – 6th Class St. Aiden’s NS, Sligo

Radharc Award

Grace – St Adrian’s National School, Sligo

RTE Factual Award

Your Home – Scoil Bhríde, Shantalla, Galway

For more information on the Fresh Film Festival click here

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