AwardsWatch

On Monday 24 October, the very last prize of the 49th edition of Film Fest Gent was handed out. The festival audience voted Mascha Halberstad's charming stop-motion film Oink as the winner of the North Sea Port Audience Award. The animated film was already the big winner at the Golden Calves in Utrecht, taking home awards for Best Film, Best Direction and Best Production Design. Oink is the official Dutch Oscar entry in the Best Animated Feature category.

The international juries announced their winners last week, but as always at Film Fest Gent the audience has the final say. Until Sunday evening, every festival visitor could cast their vote for the North Sea Port Audience Award. For a two-week period, it was a tight race between the films Sea of Time (Theu Boermans), Echo (Ruben Desiere) and Oink. In the end, Oink came out on top. With an average audience score of 4.7 out of 5, Oink, the feature debut of Dutch filmmaker Mascha Halberstad, wins the North Sea Port Audience Award. The prize comes with a distribution grant of €5,000 for Belgian distributor O'Brother Distribution, along with a media campaign worth €12,500.

Synopsis
Oink is the first stop-motion feature by Mascha Halberstad (and the first ever coming from the Netherlands!). The film tells the wonderful and exciting story of Babs and her pet pig Oink and the difficulties they must overcome in order to stay together. When 9-year-old Babs receives a pig named Oink as a present from her grandfather, she convinces her parents to let her keep it - on the condition that Oink follows a course in puppy training. But her parents are not the biggest threat to Oink, because her grandfather is secretly taking part in the sausage competition organised by The Society for Meat Products from Fresh Pigs...

O'Brother Distribution will release Oink in Belgian theatres in early 2023.