On April 23 the Movies that Matter Festival announced its winners during an online ceremony.
The Grand Jury Documentary Award (€5,000) went Farida Pacha for her film Watch Over Me, about a Delhi palliative care team visiting terminally ill cancer patients at home. The jury called it an “impressive, deeply moving documentary” and chose the winner “for its deep humanity and compassion, for its mastery of observational cinema”. Docaviv’s Festival Director Galia Bador, producer Sam Soko (Softie) and IDA executive director Simon Kilmurry were the jury members. Dying to Divorce by Chloe Fairweater and Petite Fille by Sébastien Lifshitz both received a special mention.
The Activist Documentary Award (also valued at €5000 and presented in collaboration with Amnesty International) went to director Celina Escher for her documentary Fly so Far. Escher’s film portrays Teodora del Carmen Vásquez, a woman in El Salvador sentenced to thirty years in prison for aggravated homicide after the stillbirth of her baby. The jury was unanimous, praising the cinematic quality of the documentary: “The colours and cinematography were very impressive [and] the animations between the footage gave an extra dimension of the documentary. […] The filmmaker came very close to Teodora, showing how the women were survivors, not victims.”
Eefje Blankevoort and Els van Driel received the Dutch Movies Matter Award (€5000) for their documentary ShadowGame, which folllows several teenage boys who fled their home countries and are trying to find protection in Europe.The jury, headed by Rada Šešić, said the film “offers a new angle on something we considered known” and praised the “amazing access and skilfully created visuals”.
On the fiction side, Jasmila Žbanić’s Oscar contender Quo Vadis, Aida?, about the hours leading up to the Srebrenica genocide of 1995 is the first film to win the Grand Jury Fiction Award at the festival. Jury members Liane Cunje (TIFF), head of the EFA Matthijs Wouter Knol and IFFR director Vanja Kaludjercic praised the film for “its immense task of bringing such an important personal story to the screen and audiences far and wide”.
Philippe Lacôte’s energetic Ivorian prison drama Night of the Kings, also in the race for this year’s Academy Awards, won the Camera Justitia Award, a programme section that spotlights people who stand up against corruption, inequality and discrimination in their fight for justice. The jury described the film as “a beautiful, haunting and poetic feature film” and said “the movie has an epic feel”.
The feature film Gagarine by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh was awarded the Students’ Choice Award by students from Leiden University. The visually daring meditation on life in the banlieues, and the power of following your imagination, convinced the jury because of “how cinematography was used to create an imaginative atmosphere” and they called the film “a strong example of the power of fiction”.
The Students’ Choice Award is endowed with 1.500 EUR prize money. All other awards come with a 5.000 EUR prize.
The Movies that Matter Festival 2021 runs online until April 25.
