This weekend saw the presentation of the awards of the 47th Cinéma du reel. The Grand Prix, valued at a total of €8,000 was handed to James Benning for his film ‘little boy.’ The Cinéma du réel International Award 2025 was won by two films, In the Manner of Smoke by Armand Yervant Tufenkian, and Monólogo Colectivo by Jessica Sarah Rinland, with a split pot of €5,000. The ParisDOC Works-in-Progress prize went to Bahía Honda by Alejandro Alonson. All awards…
FEATURE AWARDS
- Cinéma du réel Grand Prix 2025 Funded by the Bibliothèque publique d’information (€5,000) and the Procirep (€3,000). little boy by James Benning. Jury statement: The Cinéma du réel Grand Prix 2025 goes to a film of playfulness, precision, and deceptive simplicity. This reflection on American identity and the possibility of collectivity is an urgent and timely work by a filmmaker who has been exploring these issues for more than five decades.
- Cinéma du réel International Award 2025 Funded by the association Les Amis du Cinéma du réel (€5,000). In the Manner of Smoke by Armand Yervant Tufenkian & Monólogo Colectivo by Jessica Sarah Rinland. Jury statement: Cinéma du réel International Award 2025 is split between two films that share an attention to the craft of image-making and the human desire to control nature. One is an inventive and surprising first feature film that reflects on the frontier of representation itself. The other approaches notions of care and violence, as well as labour and tactility.
- Cnap Award for French films 2025 Funded by the Centre national des arts plastiques (5,000€).Lumière de mes yeux by Sophie Bredier Jury statement: The Cnap Award for French films 2025 goes to a work made in the aftermath of revolution that highlights the promises and perils of translation. The filmmaker questions the complexities of her own position and process while remaining devoted to her subject
- Sacem Award 2025 Funded by La Sacem (€1,000) and awarded to the composer of the original music of a feature film from the Competition. Evidence by Lee Anne Schmitt, original soundtrack by Jeff Parker. Jury statement: The Sacem Award goes to a film in which live musicians give another layer of understanding to a story of American conservatism and American family.
THE SHORT FILM AND FIRST FILM JURY AWARDS
- First Film Loridan-Ivens Award 2025 Funded by Capi Films (€3,500). Selegna Sol by Anouk Moyaux. Jury statement: Shifting in approach between cinematic myth and sensorial observation, this film unravels an intimate portrait of a group of friends living through a recent time that now feels like a distant past: a coming of age story amongst a country in political decay.
- Short Film Award 2025 Funded by the Bibliothèque publique d’information (€2,500). Notes of a Crocodile by Daphne Xu. Jury statement: With the Short Film Award 2025, we would like to recognise a film which punched us in our chests with its emotional intensity, made us dizzy with its vertiginous energy and rigour, and dazzled us with its ability to evoke complex personal, political and economic entanglements with just a few precise cinematic brush strokes. Navigating the contact zone between feverish dream and harsh reality, this short film opens up a whole universe of loss, love and desire.
- Tënk Short Film Award 2025.Funded by Tënk (€500 and acquisition of SVOD broadcasting rights on the platform Tënk). About the Pink Cocoon by Binyu Wang. Jury statement: How can we share the intimacy of someone close to us? How can we live an experience that is alien to us? For the Tënk Award, we have chosen a film that reinvents the family film and which, through the way that the filmmaker occupies the space, questions the relationship between men and women. Backed by fixed frames and enveloping light, the film is like a bubble, extremely attentive to the community of women it films. It attests as much to the power of a bond as a sliding from one state to another: a woman becomes a mother, a man initially an intruder becomes a guest. This is a film that quite literally opens up our view of the world.
THE YOUNG JURY AWARDS
- Ciné+ Festival Young Jury Award 2025 Funded by Ciné+ Festival. It guarantees that the film is bought by the channel for €15,000 and broadcast. Far from Anger by Joël Akafou. Jury statement: We are giving the Ciné+ festival Young Jury Award to a film that addresses a thorny subject sensitively and politically: restoring a community shattered by violence. We were swept up into Josiane’s quest for forgiveness, whose utopianism is conveyed through simple gestures and by building spaces for speaking and listening. Our entire jury was drawn in by this important and complex film, above all one that bears hope.
OTHER AWARDS
- Coup de cœur Orlando 2025 Handed to a project presented at ParisDOC Works-in-Progress. Bahía Honda by Alejandro Alonson. Jury statement: This year in the Works-in-Progress selection, a film plunged us into the world of ship-breakers in Cuba. A very beautiful cinematic film, mingling documentary and fiction, much like a country that “eludes all attempts to classify it”, to cite the filmmaker. A resolutely political film that we consider important and necessary to accompany through its final stages with post-production support.
- Library Award 2025 Funded by the Direction générale des médias et des industries culturelles of the Ministry of Culture (€2,500) and awarded to a film of more than 50 minutes from the International Competition. Far from Anger by Joël Akafou. Jury statement: For its character’s tenacious approach. For its conviction that, to form a community, you have to overcome divides, hate and vengeance. For the courage of a woman who tries to break the infernal cycle of violence. For its poetry, its use of storytelling, which goes further than simple observation.
- Cultural Intangible Heritage Award 2025 Awarded and funded by the Direction générale des patrimoines et de l’architecture of the Ministry of Culture (€ 2,500) to a film from the Competition. Award: Monikondee by Lonnie Van Brummelen, Siebren De Haan and Tolin Erwin Alexander Jury statement: Like a frontier river, this film navigates between two shores, taking several people on board with it. Beginning with the “Free men”, whose ancestors fled and resisted slavery, Djuka Maroons, Paamaka, Aluku, today in direct confrontation with new version of capitalism, without slavery, but whose market economy is gradually breaking down the social structures established free in the large woods. A cultural imaginary survives beyond its practice, like a regret that this film has us share. This interlocutive filmic work engages in painful and invigorating questions about culture, as the notion is now widely shared even as far as the Amazon. Special Mention: Stream-Story by Amit Dutta
- Bois-D’Arcy Inmate Award 2025 Endowed by the Fondation Sophie Rochas Desfosse (€1,000) I’m Only a Body by Eva Morin Jury statement: For its immense courage which impressed and moved us all. For its delicate treatment of an overly taboo subject. For its sense of detail and its sharing of a combat that needs to be pondered collectively.
- Clarens Award for Humanist Documentary Filmmaking 2025. Endowed by the Clarens Foundation for Humanism (€4,000) and awarded to a feature film from any of the festival’s categories. One, Angarskaia Street by Rostislav Kirpičenko. Jury statement: We are happy to award a film for its honesty, its reserve and its shared doubts, for its poetic gaze, because snow reveals the land of childhood and is appeasing, and because this filmmaker is in the right place, and puts us in the right place. The film starts from a need to take us to meet lost friends and strangers, it leads us to the edge of the abyss.
- First Window Audience Award 2025. This award is funded by the CNC (€2,000), who buys the rights from the author. I’m only a body by Eva Morin. Jury statement: The film that we have chosen for the 2025 First window Audience Award opens up inexhaustible hope for dialogue and solidarity. Beautiful and creative, it is also a generous proposal offered to the viewers to help them face the inexpressible without brutalising them. The openness and sincerity of the exchanges that build up in the film immediately circulate among us. Special Mention: Here I Belong by Clara Jeany
- Route One/DOC Award 2025 Funded by the Cinémathèque du documentaire in the form of a contract with the project’s author (€2,000), corresponding to a pre-purchase of rights for its Images de la culture catalogue. Un temps pour chercher un temps pour perdre by Arina Adju Jury statement: We have chosen to award a project that tells the story of a family caught up in the turmoil of world history. Forced into exile, its loved ones are scattered over several countries, several cultures. But a journey is under preparation, the father’s journey back to Syria.
- Préludes Award 2025 Winner: First Contact by Bob Connolly et Robin Anderson Jury statement: The jury has decided to give the Award for restoration to a first documentary film that offers an incredible vision of a unique and universal “first time”: the meeting in 1930 between a New Guinea tribe, isolated from the world, and Australian gold-diggers. In a dizzying voyage through time, this unique film proposes the images of this encounter, filmed at the time by colonists, but seen half a century later by the colonised.
