Nick Cunningham

Kani Lapuerta’s Niñxs won the IDFA Forum Award for Best Pitch, Alison O'Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves took home the IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut, and the DocLab Forum Award went to We Speak Their Names In Hushed Tones by Omoregie Osakpolor. Each award includes a cash prize of €1,500. The Tuba Thieves will also receive closed captioning and subtitles from inVision Subtitling.

Lyfta chief content officer Paulina Tervo spoke to Business Doc Europe during IDFA Forum about her platform “where kids can learn about the world through stories.” Tervo is looking to invest in doc projects from around the globe for which she can acquire educational rights. “Our vision is that by the time a child leaves school, they would've 'visited' every country in the world,” she says.

One film which is being heavily tipped for awards this year is Todd Field’s Tar in which Cate Blanchett gives a towering performance as a female orchestra conductor whose brilliant career threatens to unravel. On its current slate, US outfit Cargo Releasing has a documentary whose subject bears more than a passing resemblance to the conductor Blanchett plays in Tar. Cargo boss Davis Piperni tells more.

VPRO’s Barbara Truyen updated Business Doc Europe following her role change at Dutch public broadcaster VPRO. After 15 years as head of the documentary department she will now focus on strategic co-productions for both Dutch documentaries and series that have international potential. “My new role is not only working on the great films but also trying to come up with new ways of co-producing.”

Directed by Indonesian first time filmmaker Jeremy Kewuan and Belgian Jimmy Hendrickx and currently in production, the Belgian project Slave Island concerns modern day slavery on a remote island in Indonesia. Film Option’s Paul Cadieux is “happy that its consequential minimum guarantee was instrumental in securing additional financing for this important social impact documentary.”

Indian producer/director Pranav Pingle attends DfS with a self-funded 5-part doc series on Palestine. If you’re looking for a retelling of the country’s tumultuous recent history, then look elsewhere. Pingle’s story chooses to focus on the young, disenfranchised Palestinians who have chosen the path of creativity over conflict as a response to the violent and frenetic world around them. He explains the project to BDE.

Dutch-based Colombian experimental filmmaker Ana Bravo-Pérez’s short doc, world-premiering at IDFA, reveals a sinister link between her motherland and her adopted home, that of the environmentally damaging coal production in Colombia and its transportation to the sea ports of The Netherlands to satisfy an increasing need in Europe for electricity.

Animal by Cyril Dion (France) has won this year’s Young Audience Award (YAA). The winner was revealed during the online award ceremony, streamed live November 13 on the YAA website. The Award honours European films aimed at an audience aged 12-14 and has been an official category of the European Film Awards since 2012.

In Zsófia Paczolay’s stunningly cinematic short doc, selected for IDFA Short Competition, happy worker József lives and works within the largest operational grain silo in Budapest, descending via ropes and pullies into its gloomy depths to clean the walls. “We started to see him as some kind of an angel… with his soft and bright presence within this very harsh environment,” the director says.

Marina Meijer’s new documentary returns to familiar ground as she profiles a Rotterdam adolescent whose fate as to whether he stays at home or taken into care is decided upon by a team of anonymous social workers. “But I made very clear from the beginning. For me, this is not a film about youth care. It is a film about a boy and his mother and […] the threats from the outside world,” says Meijer.