The Flemish documentary series Draw For Change from showrunners/creators Guillaume Vandenberghe & Vincent Coen was awarded Best Documentary Series at Canneséries, it was announced April 19.
Draw For Change, which profiles female cartoonists from global hot spots, is produced by Hanne Phlypo of Clin d’Oeil Films. The female documentary makers aboard the project are Laura Nix, Nada Riyadh, Alisar Hasan, Alaa Amer, Karen Vazquez Guadarrama, Sama Pana and Anna Moiseenko. Sales are handled by Autlook.
The first of the series, Behind The Lines, directed by Syrian Alisar Hassan & Alaa Amer, world premiered at Canneséries in Documentary Competition. The feature version of Behind The Lines, which profiles cartoon artist Amany Al-Ali throughout 2020-2022 from her home in Idlib (Syria) amid devastating bombing attacks during the war, world premieres at Vision du Rèel 2023.
“It’s actually quite an amazing adventure because this collection really started off as a TV series,” producer Phlypo told Business Doc Europe in 2022. “Then we found a way to develop six films. I am a very bad producer probably because instead of making a simple TV series I think we brought something to a whole other level…when I see the five films next to each other, I am super proud of what we have achieved.”
“What I think is great is that you can actually say something in the animation or with the drawings that you can never say in reality. That, I would say, is the whole richness of this concept,” Phlypo added. “We take a portrait of a person and take it to another level using the meta-language of the animation which is the point of view of the cartoonist on her story.”
