The winners of the Doc Alliance Awards 2024 were announced June 6 at the award ceremony of Docudays UA in Kyiv. The prize for the Best Feature Film, endowed with 5,000 euros, went to The Landscape and the Fury by Nicole Vögele. Crushed by Camille Vigny received the Doc Alliance Award for Best Short Film, endowed with 3,000 EUR. Both awarded films were the nominations of Visions du Réel.
A Special Mention went to getty abortions by Franzis Kabisch, nominated by DOK Leipzig.
The winning films were selected by a jury of three film professionals: Olivia Cooper-Hadjian, programmer and film critic (Cahiers du cinéma); Beatrice Fiorentino, Artistic Director of Venice Film Critics’ Week, and Marko Grba Singh, filmmaker and the Artistic Director at Beldocs.
The Landscape and the Fury by Nicole Vögele is described as a cinematographic essay exploring the issues of displacement, flight and violence. In the Bosnian-Croatian border region near Velika Kladuša, today’s refugees meet locals who themselves once experienced war and flight. The film is about memories of war that are awakened, about barely healed scars that open up, about existential encounters between people who are united in suffering.
The jury praised the filmmaker “for its bravery and a keen sense of solidarity combined with mesmerizing camerawork.” Vögele sheds light on a refugee crisis exposing the hypocrisies of global politics “with a unique, warm distance between the filmmaker and the protagonists,” they said.
In Crushed, director Camille Vigny tells from a first-person perspective her story of the domestic violence she suffered when she was 18. Using a powerful visual metaphor, Vigny created a highly courageous political statement about the devastating impact of this abusive relationship as well as a personal blood-curdling cry from the dark.
The jury honoured Camile Vigny “for her audacity, her brilliant insight into the use of cinematic language, for her lucid elaboration of a personal trauma”. “Eros and Thanatos defy the natural instinct of survival: smashed car sheets become the metaphor of potentially wounded bodies, danger shows its dark fascination.”
The short film getty abortions by Franzis Kabisch received a Special Mentionby the jury. The film, nominated by DOK Leipzig received the Golden Dove Short Film (German Competition Documentary Film) at last year’s edition. In the film, Franzis Kabisch explores the question of how media images of abortion influence the emotional scripts in our heads.
The jury highlighted the film’s “carefully crafted audio-visual narrative”, with which the director tackles the important topic of the “crucial impact of media on the way we perceive ourselves” and makes it presentable.
The Doc Alliance network of documentary film festivals supports emerging talent in European documentary film, by both helping bolster their position as artists seeking financial support for upcoming films and in helping their work reach new audiences. Each of the seven festivals (CPH:DOX, Doclisboa, DOK Leipzig, FIDMarseille, Ji.hlava IDFF, Millennium Docs Against Gravity FF and Visions du Réel) as well as the guest festival Docudays UA nominated one short and one feature-length documentary film from its past programme. In addition, each festival in the network shows a selection from the 16 nominated films in its next edition.
A selection of nominated short films are available on the dafilms.com streaming platform from June 6 until June 16.
