Local romcom wins US film award

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• Using film to open a nation’s mind

Johannesburg - South African romantic comedy “Fanie Fourie's Lobola” won the Audience Choice Award for Best Comedy at the 19th Annual Sedona International Film Festival in Arizona, the film's director said on Tuesday.

“Audience awards are among the best harbingers of a film's success because they are decided on by regular cinema-goers,” Henk Pretorius said in a statement.

He said they were an accurate reflection of the mood at the time and what people were enjoying.

The Sedona International Film Festival was held from February 23 to March 3 and included features, shorts, documentaries, animation, and foreign 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',” the film's producers Lance Samuels and Kweku Mandela said.

“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,” Samuels and Mandela said in a statement.

This was the second audience award the film had won. It won the Jozi Film Festival Audience Award in February.

In the film an Afrikaans man and a Zulu woman fall in love and have to navigate their way through the complicated process of lobola, or payment by a bridegroom's family - usually in cash or livestock - to the bride's family.

The film was released in South African cinemas over the past weekend and stars newcomer Zethu Dlomo as Dinky and Eduan van Jaarsveld as Fanie. - Sapa