Manchester School of Art has announced that the 2017 Deutsche Bank Award for Creative Enterprise (DBACE) Awards for Film has been won by recent Manchester School of Art graduates Danielle Swindells and Francesca Carr, who take the prestigious £10,000 award plus twelve months of mentorship, closely followed by fellow Filmmaking graduate and nominee Ben Green.
Danielle’s work has already been championed by our Artistic Directors Jason Wood (Film) and Sarah Perks (Visual Art), who both are professors at Manchester School of Art. Other keen supporters include Jarman Award 2015 Winner Seamus Harrahan, Professor John Hyatt and filmmaker Marc Isaacs, whilst Francesca also recently won the Visegrad Animation Forum Short Film Pitch Prize for her work at Delaval Film.
Applicants wrote a full creative business plan and then had to pitch in London at the Deutsche Bank Headquarters to a panel of Creative Industry and Financial Experts.
Judges on the DBACE Film panel included Jim Bradshaw, Head of Film at BAFTA, Jo Stella-Sawicka, Artistic Director of Frieze for Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia as well as senior bankers from Deutsche Bank.
This is the second year in a row that qualifying students (current or within 12 months of graduating) have won the prestigious national award from the BA (Hons) Filmmaking course; Thomas Payton-Greene and Dr Safiya Noor Dhanani won the 2016 DBACE Award for Film for their project Samaanata.
The winning collaboration between Danielle Swindells & Francesca Carr will be an artist documentary that looks at the 99 interfaces or ‘peace walls’ of Belfast that physically divide the landscape into defined zones and explores how dwelling in a landscape maintained on tradition and segregation affects the human condition of those inhabiting it.
Current Filmmaking Teaching Assistant Ben Green, was also shortlisted to the highly competitive final five nominees, among students and graduates from Goldsmiths, University of Bristol and University of Leeds. Jim Bradshaw was incredibly supportive of Ben’s proposed project ‘Novi – Youth, Art, Identity: Sarajevo Twenty Seventeen’ and Ben has also recently been accepted on the Random Acts North scheme.
A huge congrats to Danielle and Francesca from all of us at HOME.