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The Rocket Wins Again

The Rocket has wowed its hometown crowd, taking out the Audience Award at the 2013 Sydney Film Festival.

This follows the film’s big wins at both the TriBeca and Berlin Film Festivals earlier this year where it also won an Audience Award, as well as other major prizes.

“After the successes at Berlin and TriBeca, it’s a great feeling for the film to be embraced by our home town. We make films for an audience, and seeing the Sydney audience so moved and excited by The Rocket as it screened at the State Theatre will live forever in my memory,” said writer/director Kim Mordaunt.

Kim and producer Sylvia Wilczynski were joined at the Sydney Film Festival by several of the cast who travelled from Laos and Thailand to be at the Festival, as well as a large number of the Australian crew.

At the recent Tribeca Film Festival in New York, The Rocket took out the Audience Award, the Best Actor Award for its young lead actor, 10-year-old Sitthiphon Disamoe and the the Best Narrative Feature Award, which was presented to the filmmakers by the festival’s co-found Robert de Niro. The Rocket will be released in cinemas around the US and Canada later this year.

At this year’s Berlin Film Festival the film won the Crystal Bear for Best Feature (Generation Kplus program), Best First Feature (across all sections of the Festival) and the Amnesty International Film Prize, also judged from all sections of the Festival.

Filmed on location in Laos and Thailand, The Rocket was written and directed by Kim Mordaunt and produced by Sylvia Wilczynski.

Sitthiphon Disamoe stars as Ahlo – a boy who enters a traditional rocket festival competition to help save his poverty-stricken family who have been uprooted for the construction of a dam.

Curious Distribution will release the film nationally on August 29.

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