The Adelaide Film Festival congratulates Director Kriv Stenders on winning the Finders Screen Award for local feature film Boxing Day at the inaugural 2007 Australian Directors Guild (ADG) Awards held in Sydney on Saturday 14 October.

Since its world premiere at the 2007 Adelaide Film Festival, Boxing Day has shown at the Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth film festivals, and has twice been nominated for the FIPRESCI (The International Federation of Film Critics) Award. It had its international premiere this month at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea.

Boxing Day will now have its North American Premiere in late October at the 2007 Festival du Nouveau Cinema (Montreal, Canada) in the Sélection Internationale, where it is competing for the coveted Louve D’or (Gold She-Wolf). It is the only Australian film to be selected in the Festival.

The selection in Festival du Nouveau Cinema comes in addition to two nominations for Boxing Day in the Inside Film (IF) Awards. The film was nominated for Best Director (Kriv Stenders) and Best Actor (Richard Green). The awards will be announced on Friday, 16 November on the Gold Coast.

The ADG’s Finders Screen Award was presented by Peter Garrett, AM, MP, Shadow Minister for the Arts to Kriv Stenders for his film Boxing Day. The ADG in collaboration with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) offered the Finders Screen Award to an Australian feature without US distribution. This Award will allow Boxing Day to be screened as part of a special program in the US called the Directors Finders Series.

On winning the Award, Stenders said, “I am genuinely appreciative and grateful for the Award. It is a tremendous honour to be recognised by your peers and the Award represents an enormous opportunity for our little film”.

Boxing Day tells the story of a father's desperate struggle to reunite his estranged family over the course of a single afternoon. Told in real time and shot as a single take, it documents the minute by minute events across the course of an afternoon in the life of Chris - a recovering alcoholic and estranged father. It was filmed entirely in Adelaide, was co-written and directed by Kriv Stenders (Illustrated Family Doctor, Blacktown) and produced by Kristian Moliere from South Australian film production company, Smoking Gun Productions.

Boxing Day was made with the generous financial support of the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund (AFFIF) - its only cash investor. The AFFIF provides equity investment in Australian screen production of $500,000 per year for two years. To date it has already invested over $1.813m.

The 2009 AFFIF slate is already shaping up to be another bumper crop. The Adelaide Film Festival Board, considering recommendations by Festival Director, Katrina Sedgwick, will select the projects which, like the 2007 slate, are sure to be diverse in both content and style.

The 2009 Adelaide Film Festival [www.adelaidefilmfestival.org] will run from 19 February to 1 March