News

More than anything Inner Lines, selected for International Competition, sends out a message of displacement and of disorientation - both geographically and mentally. It is an important and artful film, but dealing with the Yazidi genocide it is far from an easy watch.

The VdR-Industry Awards 2022 were announced April 13. With more than 2100 accredited professionals from over 80 countries, the Festival says it has broken the Industry attendance record of last year's hybrid edition (+27%). “With its numerous prizes and grants, VdR-Industry and its partners reaffirm their determination to support independent documentary filmmaking in all its diversity,” say organisers. Festival Awards will be presented on Saturday April 16.

Other winners include Alex Pritz's The Territory (Activist Documentary Award) and Myanmar Diaries by the Myanmar Film Collective which picked up the Camera Justitia Award. My Uncle Tudor by Olga Lucovnicova won the Shorts Award while Abdallah Al-Khatib’s Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege won the Students’ Choice Award.

Edited from countless home movies, Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend not only shows her best friend Kimi’s descent into drug-induced depression and death, but indirectly portrays a whole generation growing up – but often not growing old – in Putin’s Russia.

The Balcony Movie by Pawel Lozinski is named Best Film in the International Competition for Feature/Medium-length docs, while Anna and Helena Petta’s Out of Breath wins the Brazilian Comp for Feature/Medium-length. How Do You Measure a Year? and Chants from a Holy Book named best International and Brazilian short docs respectively.

A Holy Family offers an engaging, at times very moving, examination of a family that has struggled to find its balance, but which opens up to eventually appreciate and even understand each other. Review by Mark Adams.

As unlikely it sounds, Dogwatch is a delight to watch, an aesthetically pleasing and almost poetic observation of three men working as armed guards on ships traversing pirate-infested waters.

Chaylla is a powerful portrait of a woman fighting her addiction to an abusive relationship as well as a substantiated plea for a more empathic judicial system. A rewarding, inspiring and sometimes uncomfortable journey, and one totally worth taking.

An elegant and insightful blend of childlike art, music and observation helps elevate Vida Dena’s documentary My Paper Life (Ma vie en papier) to something rather special, and helps deliver a thoughtful and warm immersion into the thoughts, memories and present-day realities for a Syrian family who have escaped the war and are now living in Belgium.

SWISS FILMS Head of Festivals and Markets Andreas Bühlmann guides Business Doc Europe through the six new documentary projects offered up for consideration to the great and the good of the international sales, distribution, funding and festival community. The hybrid event takes place April 13 in Nyon.