Mike Downey Receives Lifetime Achievement Honor in Iceland – The Hollywood Reporter

Irish producer and movie trade activist Mike Downey has obtained the inaugural lifetime achievement award of the Stockfish Movie Competition in Iceland for his contributions to the worldwide movie trade.

The award, introduced at a personal ceremony Wednesday night time, acknowledges achievement from professionals within the “academe, manufacturing, distribution, movie pageant and market scenes.”

Downey, founding father of Movie and Music Leisure (F&ME), has manufacturing credit on greater than 100 function movies, together with Dome Karukoski’s Tom of Finland, Volker Schlöndorff’s Return to Montauk, Agnieszka Holland’s Charlatan and Adrian Sibley’s documentary The Ghost of Richard Harris. He’s presently engaged on Holland’s highly-anticipated upcoming Franz Kafka biopic Kafka. He’s a member of the BAFTA Council, the Asia Pacific Display screen Academy and the U.S. Academy of Movement Image Arts and Sciences.

However Downey is arguably higher identified inside the movie trade for his tireless activism on behalf of filmmakers in disaster. He was one of many main figures behind the profitable marketing campaign for the discharge of imprisoned Ukrainian director Oleh Sentsov, who was arrested by Russian forces for “terrorist acts” in 2015 after Russia annexed Crimea. In 2020, Downey was a part of the group that launched the Worldwide Coalition for Filmmakers at Threat (ICFR), to assist collective motion by the movie neighborhood for filmmakers who face political persecution for his or her work. The ICFR have campaigned for the discharge of imprisoned filmmakers in Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Sudan, Belarus and Myanmar, amongst others, and have been energetic in supporting administrators and movie trade professionals compelled to flee their nations resulting from struggle or political prosecution. The ICFR arrange a fund to assist in disaster filmmakers with small grants to cowl momentary relocation bills and authorized and administrative charges for visas and different journey paperwork.

Downey was on the Stockfish pageant to current his newest manufacturing, The Rise and Fall of Comrade Zylo, directed by Fatmir Koci, which Downey co-wrote.

“Stockfish is a superb pageant, and Iceland is house to among the greatest movie makers in Europe,” Downey stated. “There’s just one factor higher than getting an award from the viewers and that’s an award from one’s friends. Having made a dozen movies in Iceland or with Icelandic expertise, I can actually say that I’m doubly honoured. I’ve been so fortunate in my working life to have the ability to recognise early on the distinction between having a job – and having a vocation – this, I imagine got here from a way of freedom in my training and this solid a way of big independence how I’ve run my profession. Once we are capable of blur the traces between work and play and, to make use of the cliché, do what we love and love what we do – that is one thing that can’t be purchased.”