Grimmfest Announces Genre Awards and All-Woman Jury
Anya Stanley
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Grimmfest is coming!
To celebrate its 10th Anniversary, the Manchester-based horror and sci-fi film festival is announcing the first Grimmfest Awards, celebrating the cream of the genre crop and the creative teams behind them. The award winners will be announced at the end of the festival, which takes place from the 4th–7th October.
“We are launching the awards to promote and celebrate groundbreaking new talent in genre filmmaking,” said festival director and founder of Grimmfest Simeon Halligan. “For the past decade we have showcased the work of filmmakers from all around the world, keen to discover the next generation of cinematic mavericks and genre masters.”
Co-director Rachel Richardson-Jones added, “As filmmakers ourselves, we have become increasingly aware that festival recognition is not merely an acknowledgement from peers of a job well done, but also a vital means of gaining increased profile and attention for your film. Therefore, as one of the genre world’s key festivals, we have decided to reward excellence where we see it.”
This year’s all-woman awards jury includes a selection of some of the brightest lights in contemporary genre cinema, including Joanne Mitchell (Writer, Actress, Producer), Caroline Couret-Delegue (Film Sales), Lauren Ashley Carter (Actress, Writer), Andrea Subissati (Executive Editor at Rue Morgue), Annick Mahnert (Acquisitions Consultant, Festival Programmer and Producer), and Dread Central columnist Anya Stanley.
In addition, Grimmfest will partner with Horror Channel to present a Lifetime Achievement Award to honor a very special guest (to be announced) on their body of work within genre film.
The Grimmfest 2018 Festival Jurors are as follows:
JOANNE MITCHELL
Joanne Mitchell is one of the UK’s leading lights in the horror and fantasy genre. Joanne trained at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, before embarking on a richly varied career in theatre and TV, Radio and Voiceover work.
Since forming Mitchell-Brunt Films in 2011 with director-producer partner Dominic Brunt, Joanne has built a considerable reputation within genre cinema for pushing boundaries and merging drama and horror in unique ways. She conceived, produced and starred in the internationally acclaimed zombie drama Before Dawn (2013), the female revenge thriller Bait (2015) and the utterly outrageous Attack of The Adult Babies (2017), and wrote and produced the internationally-showcased horror shorts The Mighty Witch Killers of Pendle Hill and Shell Shocked. She also co-starred in the claustrophobic chiller White Settlers (2014) and unsettling Mancunian thriller Habit (2016), both directed by Grimmfest’s own Simeon Halligan. In 2017 she was nominated for Screen International’s Genre Rising Star Award. Current projects include directing her first short film and developing a movie based on her experience of competing in a female boxing bout at New York’s famous Gleason’s Gym.
CAROLINE COURET-DELEGUE
After working in feature film production in Hollywood on movies such as Big Stan starring Rob Schneider, David Carradine and Jennifer Morrison, The Last Word with Winona Ryder and Wes Bentley (nominated for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 2008), and The Chosen One starring Rob Schneider and Steve Buscemi, Caroline relocated to London to take on the role of Director of Development & Marketing at Seven Arts Pictures Plc., where she was responsible for the branding and packaging of all projects either for film markets or for release. She was also involved with international sales and distribution of the Seven Arts’ slate. Through her consulting company, Cherry Picked Pictures, she also worked with International sales agent Aspect Film and production company Lunatique Films, among others.
Caroline joined AV Pictures as Sales & Acquisitions Director in September 2011 where she gained invaluable knowledge in deal structuring from the company’s founder, Vic Bateman. In May 2014, she launched Metrodome International, the international sales arm of the Metrodome Group handling a wide range of feature films from third party producers to in-house productions. Caroline launched Truffle Pictures, a London based international sales agency and production house, in October 2016, and subsequently joined Film Seekers Ltd in January 2018.
Caroline is a French native based in London who speaks fluent French, English and Spanish. She holds two post-graduate masters degrees, one in Chemistry from the University of Versailles and the second one in Business Management from the University Montesquieu, Bordeaux.
LAUREN ASHLEY CARTER
One of the rising stars and most recognizable faces of the new wave of independent US genre cinema, Lauren began her career in New York City where she lived for the last ten years after graduating from The College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Her latest film, Imitation Girl (2018, Dir. Natasha Kermani), has been acquired by Dread Central and will be released this year on VOD and in select theaters. Her other credits include the upcoming dark comedy/horror film Gags (Dir. Adam Krause), The Mind’s Eye (Dir. Joe Begos), Grimmfest favourites Jug Face (Dir. Chad Crawford Kinkle), Lucky McKee and Jack Ketchum’s infamous The Woman, and two films directed by Mickey Keating, Pod and Darling, the latter of which resulted in her unexpectedly finding herself as Grimmfest’s poster girl for 2016.
Lauren is currently writing an adaptation of the memoir Listening for Echoes by Pam Saffran for the screen. She also has a blog where she explores the challenges, both funny and trying, of being a working actor in New York City www.wheresmybagel.com
ANYA STANLEY
Anya Stanley is a California-based author, freelance writer, and staunch Halloween 6 apologist. She currently helms two monthly columns: “Doin’ The Nasties” at Daily Grindhouse, in which she works her way through the infamous Video Nasties list, and “Gender Bashing” at Dread Central, a gender-based approach to the horror genre. Her work can also be found at Birth Movies Death, Vague Visages, and anywhere they’ll let her talk about scary movies. See more of her work at www.anyawrites.com.
ANNICK MAHNERT
Annick Mahnert studied film production at New York Film Academy and worked as a production assistant at Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons. Back in Switzerland, she went on to work in distribution and programming at 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Pathé Cinémas and Frenetic Films and at Maximage Filmproduktion as a production assistant.
Early in 2012 she joined Celluloid Dreams in Paris, handling sales and acquisitions. Since 2013, she has worked freelance as a producer, acquisitions consultant and festival programmer and is a specialist expert at the Austrian Film Institute and the Swiss Federal Office of Culture for film funding. She also works for Raven Banner, Fantastic Fest and others. Her company, Screen Division provides consultation in film acquisitions, negotiations and festival programming worldwide, as well as developing and producing film projects of its own.
In 2014, Screen Division launched a new partnership with the Imagine Film Festival in the Netherlands, the Zagreb Fantastic Film Festival in Croatia and the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia. The project, called European Genre Forum, sets to boost the careers of future players in the genre biz through three days of trainings, panels and pitching sessions. In 2016, the European Genre Forum was granted support from Media Creative Europe.
Mahnert is currently in post production on Edgar Nito’s debut feature Guachicolero and in development on The Long Walk, the new film by Mattie Do and the first ever sci-fi film from Laos. Alexandre O. Philippe’s documentary 78/52, co-produced by Screen Division, World Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2017.
ANDREA SUBISSATI
In 2010, Andrea Subissati’s masters thesis on the social impact of zombie cinema was published under the title When There’s No More Room In Hell: The Sociology of the Living Dead. Since then, she has been published in The Undead and Theology (2012), The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (2015) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television. She became editor of Rue Morgue magazine in 2017.
In addition to writing, Andrea has made guest appearances on the Rue Morgue Podcast and Pseudopod, and the TV horror documentary “Why Horror?” (2014). She is co-host and producer of The Faculty of Horror podcast with writer Alexandra West, as well as co-curator of the Toronto-based horror lecture series The Black Museum, which she co-founded with Paul Corupe.
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