Fanomenon '09 round-up: guests and award-winners

Well that's it everyone, Fanomenon is over for another year, and we hope you have enjoyed this year's festival as much as we have! We want to say thank you to all our special guests this year who have given fascinating insights into their films with some fabulous Q and A's and introductions, and are sure their time and effort to appear this year has made it extra special for all our audiences.

We've had some outstanding horror marathons in the form of Night and Day of the Dead, and it is a credit to genre cinema that the passion of you the audience is manifested in your desire to sit through so many films and be so responsive to what we have shown. With so many screenings going on, we hope you have been able to see something you wouldn't see anywhere else, whether that was a superhero scientist battling sex-crazed reefer zombies, a sci-fi musical western, or seeing what a human centipede would actually look like.

Special congratulations to everyone at Thought Bubble, and to the one and a half thousand plus people who attended and made it what has been called the best comic con in the world; it really is just getting better every year. Lastly but by no means least, thank you to the Silver Méliès jury for selecting some very worthy winners to go through to the Golden Méliès competition. You can read about what won and why below, and congratulations to everyone in the competition; the standard this year was outstanding.

So the festival might be over for another year, but Fanomenonleeds.com certainly isn't. Keep checking Fanomenonleeds.com over the coming months as we have some very exciting (and massive!) plans in the pipeline for Fanomenon 2010, and we will continue to develop the website as your source for genre cinema on the internet. One last thank you is due to you all: Fanomenon is nothing without fans, and we'll be back very soon, bigger and better than ever...

Silver Méliès winning feature - Heartless

Philip Ridley's Heartless stood out among the competition for its deft blending of fantasy and reality, its assured handling of a great many disparate genre elements ' horror, urban drama, comedy and more besides ' and the way it presented these familiar elements in a way that seemed both new and vital. It is an earnest film, one that bravely wears its heart on its sleeve throughout key plot points and character development, where in the hands of a different director and cast the emotional impact of this material could very easily have fallen flat. Visually captivating, wonderfully scripted and acted with a tremendous lead performance from Jim Sturgess, whether taken purely as entertainment or as an artistic statement it succeeds masterfully in every respect and for this reason it is a pleasure to award Heartless the 2009 Leeds International Film Festival Silver Méliès.

Silver Méliès special mention ' Sodium Babies

The Decaillon Brothers' Sodium Babies also stood out for its visual invention and daring appropriation of a huge variety of influences, taking what was on some level familiar about the vampire mythos and turning it into something genuinely distinctive, eye-catching, spirited and fresh. While not as fully developed as it could have been, the directors deserve to move on to bigger and better things, and for this reason Sodium Babies receives a special commendation.

Golden Méliès short film nomination - Pathos

The ideas seen in Pathos are not new ' they were popularised by The Matrix but existed long before that ' yet they are handled with a degree of self-confidence, control and depth of emotion which within the restrictions of a short film is quite breathtaking. Despite budget limitations, a single set and a lead performance entirely without dialogue the film still succeeds both in engaging the audience with a steadily elevating level of tension from start to finish and in proving effectively bathetic and even genuinely thought-provoking. It is a pleasure to award Pathos the 2009 Leeds International Film Festival nomination for the Golden Méliès.

Short film special mention - Déjà

Déjà (a.k.a. Already) is a deceptively simplistic film. Technically and artistically competent it is nonetheless a detached experience which for the majority of its short running time gives away nearly nothing of its intentions. However, though its effectiveness may hinge on a twist, it is a beautifully handled last-minute reveal ' again, simple, yet subtly, startlingly moving, and for this reason it deserves a special commendation.