The Girona filmmaker Jordi Calvet has won six awards with the short film ‘Takbeer‘ a l’Indie Short Fest held in Los Angeles (USA). This is a very important independent short film contest that takes place in the city of cinema. ‘Takbir’ is a film where a thriller author reports to the police that ISIS has copied some of the ideas he had devised for a fake TV series. This is the first short film from Girona that has already accumulated several distinctions and has been presented at the Sitges, Cannes and Japan festivals. Now, ‘Takbir’ is already preparing to land in Canada and California with several nominations in other film festivals.
Jordi Calvet has won the award of Best Short Film in the Thriller Genre, Best Producer, Best New Director, Best Screenplay, Best Foreign Language Short of the Season and Best Cast. The awards were announced this December at the Indie Short Fest that takes place in Los Angeles and it is expected that in the coming weeks they will hold a gala where Calvet will attend together with other winners of the contest in the capital of cinema.
The short film ‘Takbir’ premiered last October 11 showing a fiction linked to jihadism. The fiction details the story of a thriller author who is commissioned by a production company in Turkey to make a television series about a terrorist group that carries out attacks in several cities. Six months later, this author sees how the ISIS group materializes two of the proposed attacks that the author had devised.
Faced with the terror that the man experiences when he sees that he has become the mastermind of these operations, he decides to go to the National Police station to warn them that the next attack should take place in Madrid.
‘Takbir’ is the first short film that Jordi Calvet has directed, although it has a first-class cast. They act in it Pedro Casablanc, Xènia Tostado, Octavi Pujades, Macarena Gómez or Ares Teixidó.
Since its release, Jordi Calvet has already presented the short film at several film festivals, winning several awards. The first of them came from home, at the Girona Film Festival, but it has also won awards at festivals in Japan and Amsterdam. In addition, ‘Takbir’ has already been played in Sitges or Cannes.
Award at the Nador festival
The last of the awards came this December, at the Nador International Festival (Morocco) when Jordi Calvet won the award for best short film. Jordi Calvet, who is also a PSC councilor in the Girona City Council, received the Nador award from the Deputy Minister for External Action, European Union and Cooperation of the Junta d’Andalusia, Enric Millo.
Calvet has been euphoric with the good reception this short film is having on the festival circuit and now has his sights set on two more dates, one in Vancouver and the other in California. A film festival will be held in these two cities where ‘Takbir’ is also nominated.
Terrorism, present in Calvet’s fiction
‘Takbir’ is based on the novel·la ‘The Sword of Allah‘, which Calvet published in 2015. In this case, Calvet based the fiction on a terrorist attack at Camp Nou during a derby between Barça and Madrid. Following this novel, the author promoted the book and many journalists asked him if he was suffering because the book did not serve as an idea for new attacks.
Calvet believes that “it’s fiction” and that you need to differentiate between reality and what you write in a novel. “I don’t think an American film director will be asked the same question,” said the author. Despite everything, he decided to start writing the script for the short film that ended up seeing the light of day this autumn.