Alternativa Film Festival Names 7 Winners, Plots Africa Pivot
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Alternativa Film Festival closed its 3rd edition April 30 in Medellín, Colombia, awarding $20,000 per feature category and $10,000 per short to seven winners drawn from 30 films spanning Latin America and Asia, with close to 11,000 festival and industry attendees.
- Peru's "Runa Simi" won the Focus Award for Augusto Zegarra's documentary about a Quechua radio host who dubbed "The Lion King" into the Indigenous language; Georgia's "9-Month Contract" by Ketevan Vashagashvili took Spotlight for following a homeless woman who became a surrogate mother five times.
- Iran's "Cutting Through Rocks" by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni—who could not attend—won the Alter Award, while Japan's Akio Fujimoto scored Nativa for "Lost Land," a Japan-France-Malaysia-Germany co-production about Rohingya siblings' hide-and-seek as a survival metaphor.
- Festival head Liza Surganova announced Africa as the 4th edition's focus region and confirmed the itinerant festival relocates wherever its parent company inDrive operates, having moved from Kazakhstan to Indonesia to Colombia.
- Alternativa is launching a distribution arm to get winning films seen, with staff traveling to Cannes "in a couple of weeks" to negotiate with streaming platforms, TV channels, and in-flight systems, CEO Arsen Tomsky confirmed.
- Industry Days panelists from Mubi, Retina Latina, and Chile's Pijama warned streaming platforms buy only about 20% of global film output, urging filmmakers not to bypass regional festivals for A-list events as theatrical windows collapse.
Why it matters: For seven winning filmmakers, Alternativa's distribution arm and $20,000 checks offer a route past collapsed theatrical windows and streaming concentration—**Retina Latina's data** shows major platforms buy only ~20% of worldwide output. Meanwhile, inDrive's 'go where we operate' festival model fuses ride-hailing corporate strategy with cinema diplomacy, now pivoting to Africa for its 4th edition.
