Nick Cunningham

The Flats by Alessandra Celesia won the main Dox:Award prize. The F:ACT AWARD prize was handed to Black Snow by Alina Simone. The NORDIC:DOX Award went to The Son and the Moon by Roja Pakari. The NEW:VISION Award was won by Preemptive Listening by Aura Satz, while the NEXT:WAVE award went to Grand Me by Atiye Zare Arandi. The HUMAN:RIGHTS Award was handed to ‘Black Box Diaries’ by Shiori Ito, while the Audience Award went to No Other Land by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal. All winners and citations…

Greek director Elina Psykou, whose Stray Bodies plays in CPH:DOX F:ACT AWARD, spoke to BDE about the recent protests in Thessaloniki over the film’s poster that depicts a semi-naked and pregnant Madonna nailed to the Cross. Psykou, who received online hate mail over past weeks, says she is apprehensive about the film’s wider opening in Greece on March 28, but will not be deterred from using the same poster. “I don't want to let fear conquer,” she says. “But I have to admit that after all these days, I'm very exhausted.”

The winners of the CPH:INDUSTRY awards 2024 were announced March 21 in Copenhagen. Four awards were handed out to CPH:FORUM projects looking for gap-financing as well as CPH:LAB projects with their focus on immersive non-fiction. Three CPH:LAB project awards were handed out at the Prototype Event in Odd Fellow Palace on March 18. All winners…

Three Catalan documentaries will compete in the Official Section of the DocsBarcelona 2024 International Documentary Film Festival, and nine more will compete in the new Docs&Cat section. A total of twelve titles make up the DocsBarcelona's “firmest commitment to the Catalan creative talent and industry, with which the event vindicates the particular look that Catalan cinema dedicates to the documentary genre,” write organisers.

The official selection includes 165 films from 50 different countries, with gender parity for the second year running, the festival underlines. These include 88 world premieres and 14 international premieres. The 55th edition will open with the Danish film As the Tide Comes In by Juan Palacios (co-directed by Sofie Husum Johannesen). VdR 2024 runs 12-21 April.

Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub’s delicious and elegiac feature documentary describes a love triangle of sorts, between a female Irish aristocrat, the revered 20th Century architect Le Corbusier and the house that she built in 1929 on the Côte d’Azur, which he later appropriated. Minger had been pre-warned about the allure of the brilliant Eileen Gray. “Beatrice, be careful because if you enter the Gray zone, you'll never get out of it,” she was told.

The Geneva Grand Prize was awarded to Edward Lovelace’s Name Me Lawand, a deeply moving narrative portraying the journey of a deaf Kurdish teenager in exile, while The Sergio Vieira de Mello Prize went to Mohamed Jabaly’s Life is Beautiful, a Palestinian film showcased during a dedicated event honouring those who portray the narratives of the Palestinian people through documentaries, photography and film.

Trapped in the freezing forest between Belarus and Poland, 16-year-old Kurdish refugee Runa must assume all family responsibilities for her father and brothers after the death of their mother. In her new hybrid doc, Polish Agnieszka Zwiefka follows Runa as she tries to create a new life for her family in Poland, in the process telling a story both terrifying and inspirational. “This is actually our obligation as documentary filmmakers. Who would we be if we didn't react to such a humanitarian crisis at our doorstep,” Zwiefka underlines to BDE.

“Our film is a love story featuring four deaf couples signing the stories of how they met, fell in love, and the joys of complexities of their relationships,” Irish producer Anne Heffernan told the audience of change-makers at FIFDH Impact Days. “Together, these cinematic love stories weave a tapestry of deaf experience over a 70-year period and we believe it will make people think differently about what it means to be Deaf in a hearing world."

The Long Rescue tells a desperate tale of abuse, but the focus is on recovery rather than trauma, survival rather than rescue. It’s a story of human trafficking in The Philippines. “Sexual violence can feel overwhelming, but we're here because we believe much can and must be done,” director Jennifer Huang told the Geneva audience. “We invite you to talk with us about how we can work together to support the journeys of these survivors in their recovery, discovery, and agency.”