Johannesburg, South Africa, 11 May 2020 – The International Tourism Film Festival Africa (ITFFA) has released the winning entries for the 2020 ITFFA Awards.
The showreel will be officially launched this evening at 19h00 CAT via the ITFFA YouTube channel and shared extensively on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter channels using the hashtags #itffa2020 #rebuildingtourism, and #rebuildingtravel.
Tourism Film Festival Lockdown Edition
Labelled as the “Lockdown Edition”, and presented by South African musician Arno Carsens, the stunning showreel features 15 home-grown film award winners, each announced by industry celebrities presenting the winning award category video title, client and producer.
The awards were originally scheduled for presentation at the Tourism Film Conference on 07 April in Cape Town, to coincide with World Travel Market Africa (WTM Africa). However, following the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent lockdown in mid-march, the Africa Travel Week event, which is comprised of WTM Africa and International Luxury Travel Market Africa (ILTMA), had to be postponed to 2021.
“The decision by Reed Exhibitions, the organiser of WTM Africa, to postpone the event was both justifiable, and unavoidable,” says ITFFA Director, Caroline Ungersbock. “The response to our call for tourism promotional video entries in 2019 was phenomenal and we could not disappoint them by postponing the winner announcement. We simply had to find a way to present the awards. Fortunately, Brendan Stein from SoapBox Productions in Cape Town offered to compile the winners’ showreel, and from there everything fell into place beautifully.”
Public Viewer Competition
Leading on from the awards showreel launch, each category winners’ video entry will be promoted on the ITFFA YouTube and social media channels for 15 weeks starting from next week (Monday 18 May 2020).
“We’re planning a competition with amazing prizes to tie-in with the weekly roll-outs,” says James Byrne, ITFFA Festival Coordinator. “Each week, over 15 weeks, we will show one of the winners’ tourism video clips, repeatedly, for that week running from Monday to Friday.
“Our media partners will collectively publish/broadcast the category winners’ video link and invite their respective readers, listeners, viewers and followers to engage by entering the weekly competition and be eligible to win a lucky-draw prize by going to our Instagram page, follow us, and answer a question about the video clip that they have watched.
“On the Friday of each week, radio presenter Jacques de Klerk of ZONE Radio will conduct the lucky draw live on air. The winner will then be phoned, and the contributor of the prize will hand it over, live, on-air,” concludes Bryne.
The first-ever film festival of its kind in South Africa, the inaugural tourism film festival took place in Cape Town from 20-24 November 2019. Organised by the Sustainable Tourism Partnership Programme (STPP) in cooperation with the International Committee of Tourism Film Festivals (CIFFT) in Austria, ITFFA’s main aim is to contribute to the development of domestic and international tourism while fostering growth in the local film industry.
To promote South Africa and Africa as tourist destinations, the ITFFA encourages short film productions that showcase South Africa and Africa as tourist destinations and expose the continent to international filmmakers.
International Exposure
The winners of the 2020 ITFFA Awards will now be entered into the CIFFT Awards for international adjudication and screening.
“For its part as an ITFFA partner, CIFFT is acknowledged as the most prestigious awards and recognition initiative in the international travel video marketing industry. With 18 festival members, the Grand Prix CIFFT Circuit is the most exclusive travel and tourism industry video marketing competition, spanning 16 countries and 18 cities,” says CIFFT President, Alexander V. Kammel. “The award-winning tourism film videos will be screened in major cities worldwide, including New York, Los Angeles, Cannes, Riga, Deauville, Baku, Zagreb, Berlin, Vienna, and Warsaw. Participating counties include Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Japan Poland, Portugal, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, and Turkey.”
Gaining even further exposure for award winners, the 2020 ITFFA Awards showreel will also be screened locally on DUrban TV, and internationally to 400 million viewers on TV BRICS in Moscow, and on USA media celebrity Michaela Guzys’ website and social media channels ‘OhThePeopleYouMeet’.
Corporate Social Responsibility
The ITFFA has adopted two Non-Profit Organisations as their CSR initiatives and aims to raise awareness and much-needed funding for these causes.
The Healing Farm Haven
The Healing Farm in the Koo Valley farming area, just north of Montagu in the Western Klein Karoo, provides a haven of unconditional love, where hurt and broken people come to heal and discover their potential. Their long-term goal is to establish a village, consisting of about six units to house widows, single moms and orphans, and a school.
As a registered NPO, the Healing Farm Haven is finding that funding is hard to come by, especially now that the coronavirus lockdown has stopped their donor collection efforts.
“I have been visiting and supporting this haven for many years now and anecdotes recited with passion by the farm residents make this NPO a cause worthy for our collective support,” says Byrne.
Walk4Africa.org
The second CSR cause, Walk4Africa.org (W4A), is a non-profit multi-stage walkathon project that aims to raise awareness on the United Nations Sustainable Tourism Development Goals (SDGs), to highlight climate change issues, and to create global awareness on Sustainable Tourism in Africa.
The walkathons will circumnavigate Africa’s 38 coastal countries and ocean islands and will become the world’s longest multi-stage walkathon when it concludes the distance of approximately 40,000 km (52 million steps) by 2030.
Announcing the adoption of the W4A project as a CSR cause in March this year, Caroline Ungersbock said that Walk4Africa’s mission aligns perfectly with the aims of the film festival. “A multi-stage walkathon of this magnitude sparks the imagination, and that’s exactly what the ITFFA aims to do. Both provide much-needed exposure for attractive, but previously unknown, destinations to create critical links between tourists and the communities they visit, providing sustainable tourism development opportunities within those communities.”
Speaking for the ITFFA partner organisation, the African Tourism Board (ATB) CEO, Doris Wörfel supported Ms Ungersbocks’ statement by saying that the Walk4Africa project also aligns with the ATBs mandate; to promote economic development, increase employment and reduce poverty in Africa. “The W4A project aligns with our mandate to work with governments, the private sector, and rural communities in promoting and facilitating sustainable tourism growth and development across the African continent. Walk4Africa’s walkathon project will certainly do this in a very unique and impactful way.”
For more information about the International Tourism Film Festival Africa visit itff.africa.
