The Blunder of Love by Rocco Di Mento
On July 13, the Doc Alliance network of seven of the most influential European documentary film festivals* announced the winners of its 14th annual Doc Alliance Awards during the Doc Day Lunch at the Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes.
The Blunder of Love by Rocco Di Mento, nominated by DOK Leipzig and produced by Valeria Venturelli at the German Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, won the Doc Alliance Award – Best Feature Film.
The first ever Doc Alliance Award – Best Short Film went to Bless You! (Zdrastvuyte!), directed by Tatiana Chistova and nominated by Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
Each film receives a cash prize for the directors to spend on their next project. This amounts to €5000 for the Best Feature Award winner Di Mento, and €3000 for Bless You! director Tatiana Chistova.
Additionally, the Doc Alliance festivals have committed to screen at least 3 of the nominated films during each of their upcoming editions. The winners are available to view, along with a selection of the nominees, on Doc Alliance’s platform, DAFilms.com, until 18 July 2021.
In The Blunder of Love, through old 8mm home movies, an unpublished novel, various love letters and a host of long-suppressed feelings, director Di Mento sets out to explore the myth of his grandparents’ romance and tries to honour his deceased grandfather on film, assisted by all the surviving relatives. Not an easy undertaking when things may not have been exactly as the family tradition would have it…
The jury said that even though The Blunder of Love is not the first film in which a director turns the camera on their own family, “it is done with a charming curiosity that evolves into a genuine deconstruction of myth and a discrete revelation of family secrets and trauma and how it is passed on from generation to generation.”
In Bless You!, against the backdrop of Saint Petersburg’s courtyards during the COVID-19 lockdown, the film fuses recordings of the almost empty city and calls to a municipal hotline designated for the elderly, after the government imposed a strict round-the-clock curfew on them.
The jury stated that Bless You! “captures the feeling of anxiety, isolation, boredom and confusion in the pandemic and finds a very simple, but powerful and honest way to do it.”
Doc Alliance is a network of seven of Europe’s leading documentary film festivals: CPH:DOX (Denmark), Doclisboa (Portugal), DOK Leipzig (Germany), FIDMarseille (France), Ji.hlava IDFF (Czech Republic), Millennium Docs Against Gravity (Poland) and Visions du Réel (Switzerland).
For the Doc Alliance Awards, each festival nominated one feature-length film and, for the first time this year, one short (up to 30 minutes) by an emerging filmmaker from their most recent lineup.
The winners were chosen by a jury of seven international film critics, also selected by the festivals. This year’s jury members were Kristoffer Hegnsvad (CPH:DOX), Vasco Câmara (Doclisboa), Carolin Weidner (DOK Leipzig), Sandra Onana (FIDMarseille), Pavel Sladký (Ji.hlava IDFF), Ola Salwa (Millennium Docs Against Gravity) and Simone Späni (Visions du Réel).
