COLIN, the £45 zombie movie that took the Cannes Film Festival by storm earlier this year, has won one of the top prizes at the 17th Raindance Film Festival.

The film took the Best Micro-Budget prize and was one of several winners announced on Sunday night (October 11, 2009), prior to the screening of Closing Night film, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience.

Other categories included Best UK Feature (Down Terrace), Best International Feature (jointly shared by 25 Kilates and My Suicide), Best Debut Feature (Redland), Best Documentary (A Normal Life Please), Best UK Short (Infidel), Best International Short (Of Best Intentions) and Film of the Festival (The Slow Game).

All award winners were announced at the Apollo West End.

Raindance is the UK ’s largest independent film festival, showcasing shorts and features from around the world and specialising in directorial debuts.

As well as showing independent films from around the world, it hosts a number of special events, including masterclasses, Q&A sessions with industry professionals, its renowned pitching event Live where you could end up selling your idea to a movie exec, one-off versions of the courses they run year-long, and, of course, parties.

One of this year’s many success stories was Ctrl.Alt.Shift’s special screening of five provocative short films, 1,000 Voices, War School, HIV: The Musical, Man Made and No Way Through.

Ctrl.Alt.Shift is the experimental youth initiative politicising a new generation of activists for social justice. Using the creative mediums of photography, film, stories, illustrations and music, it highlights issues of global development to bring about change.

The short films were created as a result of a national competition hosted by Ctrl.Alt.Shift which saw aspiring filmmakers aged between 18 and 25 write a treatment based around three key issues: War + Peace, Gender + Power and HIV + Stigma.

You can view the short films by CLICKING HERE

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