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The Documentary Awards
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AWARD CELEBRATION
Sunday Septembre 22th, 2014 / 10 pm
Studio des Ursulines/ Paris
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The Main Award
Documentary (over 45 min)
Voices of El Alto (Voces de El Alto)
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Benjamin Oroza
Finlande, South Africa
2013 | 0:49:0|0
A tent is pitched on the market square of El Alto, the Bolivian city perched 4,000 meters above sea level. The filmmakers ask random passersby to tell a personal story for the camera. The film opens with a young girl half giggling, half crying as she describes a very unpleasant experience. It seems that the impersonal camera has become the first confidant she has had for a long time. It's a confronting first scene, but at its core it's representative of what is to follow. The Finnish-Bolivian director Benjamin Oroza explains that this "story tent" – which he has been taking all over the world since 2009 – is a way of "making films with them, not about them. I want my films to convey a sense of us – while I remain silent and invisible." Oroza's sympathetic presence and the generosity of the passersby in sharing their personal experiences combine to create a sensitive collage of stories, a poignant and intimate insight into personal joy and sorrow. There's everything from an optimistic anecdote about a first kiss to a loudly declaimed mini-play about the native population's struggle for independence, along with accounts of runaway spouses, violent fathers, and the pain of being cast out by your own family.
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Directors Statement:
I feel very honoured to be prized tonight, here in Paris, in Signes du Nuit, probably the best international independent film festival in the world. Members of the jury, thank you so much. I'm happy for the audience who had a unique chance to see an incredible selection of films. I wish I could have been there with you, discovering a world of innovative cinema. And Dieter, the soul of this festival, thanks for giving Voices of Alto a chance to be seen among the very best films. Continue your good work, and keep leading us to worlds unseen, unheard and unknown, and finally, to a deeper understanding of ourselves.
Benjamin Oroza |
The Signs Award
Documentary (over 45 min)
Gasland, Part 2
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The Signs Award for Documentary honors films, which express in a
surprising way sensible and perturbing aspects of reality.
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Josh Fox
USA
2013 | 2:01:00
In this explosive follow-up to his Oscar®-nominated film GASLAND, filmmaker Josh Fox uses his trademark dark humor to take a deeper, broader look at the dangers of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the controversial method of extracting natural gas and oil, now occurring on a global level (in 32 countries worldwide). GASLAND PART II, which premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, shows how the stakes have been raised on all sides in one of the most important environmental issues facing our nation today. The film argues that the gas industry’s portrayal of natural gas as a clean and safe alternative to oil is a myth and that fracked wells inevitably leak over time, contaminating water and air, hurting families, and endangering the earth’s climate with the potent greenhouse gas, methane. In addition the film looks at how the powerful oil and gas industries are in Fox's words "contaminating our democracy".
Extract, news and interview:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/12/josh_fox_on_gasland_part_2+ d'infos
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The Night Award
Documentary (over 45 min)
Belleville Baby
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The Night Award for Documentary honors films, which
represent reality in an ambivalent and enigmatic way,
avoiding stereotypes of representation and simple conclusions.
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Mia Engberg
Suède
2013 | 1:15:00
A telephone call from a long lost lover causes her to reminisce about their mutual past. She remembers the spring when they met in Paris; the riots, the Vespa, and the cat named Baby. A film about love, time, and the things that were lost along the way.+
d'Suède
2013 | 1:1
A telephone cam a long lost lover causes her to reminisce about their mutual past. She remembers the spring when they met in Paris; the riots, the Vespa, and the cat named Baby. A film about love, time, and the things that were lost along the way.
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The Edward Snowden Award
Documentary (over 45 min)
The Lab (Hamaabada)
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The Edward Snowden Award honors films, which offer sensible (mostly) unknown informations, facts and phenomenons of eminent importance, for which the festival wishes a wide proliferation in the future.
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Yotam Feldman
Israel, France, Belgique
2013 | 0:58:00
In the past decade, the Israeli military control over 3.75 million Palestinians has become an economic endeavour that is considered the key element to the Israeli wealth. The means used by the military against Gaza and in the West Bank are exported worldwide. The film shows how the military occupation is a national business enterprise so valuable that the State of Israel cannot afford to lose.
Yotam Feldman: the Israeli economy has become dependent on the massive security market. Governments act in hypocrisy when they purchase Israeli arms used against Palestinians, but criticize Israeli violence. |
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The Main Award
Documentary (up to 45 min)
Minerita
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Raúl de la Fuente
Espagne
2013 | 0:27:00
Life is really tough in the bleak Cerro Rico mining district in Potosi, Bolivia. This is true for the men risking their lives going down into the mine shafts looking for silver ore, and also for the women, who are viewed by men as fair game. Lucia (40), Ivonne (16) and Abigail (17) talk about their daily lives, in which they are constantly dealing with violence, much of it sexual. Lucia works as a night guard and often has to protect herself by setting off TNT. She wanders the inhospitable area accompanied by a pack of dogs. Ivonne always carries rocks with her to throw at potential attackers. But they are not even safe at home. "You can’t even trust your own brothers and father," Ivonne explains. Abigail is the only woman in the area who goes down into the mines herself. She knows that as a minor she is not officially allowed to work there, but nobody has ever told her about her rights. The camera follows her down the pitch-black shafts, where the miners pray to a demon. “There’s no god in the mine,” says Abigail. In an area where not even weeds can grow, these tough and vulnerable women survive with a mix of courage and dynamite.
Extract:
http://vimeo.com/71877977
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The Signs Award
Documentary (up to 45 min)
When I Am a Bird
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The Signs Award for Documentary honors films, which express in a
surprising way sensible and perturbing aspects of reality.
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Monika Pawluczuk
Poland
2013 | 0:28:30
"When I Am A Bird", immersed in the world of fortune tellers and ghosts, tells the story of the attempt to change one's fate. MuLa, a Kayan woman, refugee from Burma, has been living in Thailand for two years with her husband and all her sons. On the other side of the border her only daughter is left. The mother wants to bring her over to a better world. The time of waiting, full of anxiety and tension, sets the rhythm and the atmosphere of the film.
Extract:
http://vimeo.com/71326544
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Directors Statement:
It was an immense pleasure having my film selected for the Signes de Nuit 2014, a unique festival open to so many new, experimental, independent and alternative productions. A few weeks after the announcement, when I had in hands the program of this edition of the festival I got attonished by the curatorial choices and the wide and unusual subjects of the films selected and sincerelly regret not being able to be present at the event. Tonight, not being in Paris to receive this prize I get even more disapointed, but really glad of this recognition, really glad to realize that a five decades old story of a brazilian artist can find echo and interest on audiences worldwide, it just makes clear to me I had chosen the right path trusting in the power of archives to communicate, that human dramas are universal and that forgotten sound and images laying in old film cannisters can be explored in an effort to broad film as a language and to raise new reflections about our history and existence. |
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The Edward Snowden Award
Documentary (up to 45 min)
Radioactive
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The Edward Snowden Award honors films, which offer sensible (mostly) unknown informations, facts and phenomenons of eminent importance, for which the festival wishes a wide proliferation in the future.
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Funahashi Atsushi
Japon 2013 | 0:35:00
Atsushi shows the helplessness, missing will to take consequences and hypocrisy of the Japanese politics and atom industry management concerning the catastrophe in Fukishima. He portraits people, who even two years later still living in emergency accommodation waiting for an answer (or an excuse) of their politicians. These people put on the
waiting line don't take much care of the global consequences of the accidence, for example in Germany. Even when the TV is offering news, they are playing cards. Only from time to time there we observe a kind of resistance, more or less helpless expressing their resentment.
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Directors Statement:
Thank you very much for the Edward Snowden Award!
It's such an honour to receive the award.
Radiation is invisible. You can't smell, touch, or taste it. It goes where it wants, and no one knows how to handle it. Its constant presence is casting a dark shadow over most people in FUKUSHIMA, and it's become a form of torture. Now many people have no choice to keep living there.
We all know this is WRONG!
We have to do something about it.
Thank you,
Atsushi Funahashi |
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Mention
Documentary (up to 45 min)
The Appeal of the Birds
(Le rappel des oiseaux)
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Stéphane Batut
France
2014 | 0:40:00
In 4 August 2009, Batut was on a family trip in Kham, a Chinese province inhabited by Tibetans. By chance he was invited to attend a "heavenly funeral", where the corpse of the deceased is offered up to vultures. By beginning his film with images that he is reviewing on his editing table, he immediately establishes a device that constantly puts into perspective what he has seen, heard and filmed. He asks an exiled Tibetan to sit with him and describe the steps of this unforgettable experience of seeing.
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