ICA Calls for Entries for Belize International Film Fest

The dates are set for the 2015 Belize International Film Festival. The tenth edition of the popular festival will take place from July seventeenth through the nineteenth in Placencia. It features unique, culturally-inspired and independent films with storylines that celebrate life from various perspectives. Today, the Film and Media Arts Unit of the Institute of Creative Arts issued a call for entries for submissions by local and international film makers for six different categories. Founder and Director, Suzette Zayden, says that this year, a new category has been added that is exclusive to the Caribbean and Central America for mini-series, telenovelas and soap operas.

Suzette Zayden

Suzette Zayden, Director, Film and Media Arts Unit, ICA

“The call for submissions have actually been opened from January first and it will be closed March thirty-first. We’ve been working out some of the kinks, but we pretty much want to remind Belizean film makers out there that the call is opened right now and if you have music videos, this is a category that is only opened to Belizeans. The music video has to be a Belizean artist and it has to be filmed in Belize. The festival has six categories: there is the feature length narrative, the feature length documentary, the short documentary, the short fiction and the music video that I just mentioned. This year, we are introducing a new category called the TV dramatic series and we are actually opening it to the pilot of these series. As you noted, it seems to be growing in Belize….it started with No Matta Wat; there’s been other series that came along. Last year, the La Isla Bonita also premiered being the first telenovela. So we are looking at the trend and we want to encourage it. So this year, although we didn’t have a category for TV, we opened up a new category for TV this year. Because there is only like two that we know of from Belize, we opened it up to the Caribbean and Central America as well so that there is a chance for us to see what is happening out there, the quality level and the stories that are being told.”