The winner of the East Doc Platform Award 2021 was announced March 17 as the Ukrainian Lagoons. A Battle for Paradise by director Serhiy Lysenko and producers Anna Kapustina and Oleksandra Kravchenko. The jury highlighted the project’s “very strong scenes and characters, and themes about man’s greed versus the protection of the natural world.”
The East Doc Platform Award includes cash support of €7500 for development and production.
The project also received the Current Time TV Director’s Award, valued at 3000 USD. The prize was dedicated to the memory of Belarusian filmmakers Maxim Gavrilenko, Lyubov Zemtsova and Vladimir Mikhailovski, who died in a car accident in May 2020.
The Czech TV Co-production Award, offering 150 000 CZK as well as a co-production deal, went to the project 72 Hours, about a struggling mother in Belarus, directed by Anna Savchenko. 72 Hours is a co-production between Belarus, Belgium and France.
The Hungarian project Kix – A Story of a Street Kid (directed by Balint Révész & Dávid Mikulán and produced by Viki Réka-Kiss) won the HBO Development Award. The jury noted the persistence of the filmmakers in “following for more than a decade a coming-of-age story. It also offers a strong insight into the life of the young generation in post-Communist countries, where their fate is sometimes pre-destined.”
Among other awarded projects was the Russian co-production The Trans Syrian Express, directed by Alina Rudnitskaya and produced by Pertti Veijalainen, which received the Sunny Side of the Doc Prize and the DocsBarcelona Award.
Director Diana Fabiánová and producer Silvia Panáková received the Golden Funnel worth €1,000 for the Slovak-Czech co-production The Boundaries of Fidelity, a project that made the greatest progress during the year-long Ex Oriente Film programme.
East Doc Platform, organized by the Institute of Documentary Film, welcomed over 400 film professionals between March 6 – 17. The extended online edition offered not only networking activities, but also a number of lectures, presentations and masterclasses, including Alexander Nanau’s talk about his Academy Award nominated Collective.
The open programme was available for the accredited guests in the Guest Zone at dokweb.net with two panel discussions streamed also on Facebook. The East Doc Forum was spread across three days. The first two days were devoted to feature-length projects, while the third day brought XR projects and factual series.
The Institute of Documentary Film is currently celebrating 20 years of existence at DAFilms.com with the selection of 20 Eastern and Western European films which were part of IDF’s activities including Ex Oriente Film workshop, East Silver Market, East Doc Platform and KineDok.
Other winning projects at East Doc Platform 2021 were:
Ex Oriente Fine Cut Award
A Year of Endless Days (dir. Renata Lučić, prod. Tamara Babun, Matija Drniković, HR)
Cut Thru the Noise Award
Smiling Georgia (dir. Luka Beradze, prod. Nino Chichua, Anna Khazaradze, GE, DE)
IDFA Spotlight Award
Swinging Fields (dir. Sareen Hairabedian, prod. Azza Hourani, JO, US, IE)
DOK Leipzig DOK Co-Pro Market Award
I’m Not Everything I Want to Be (dir. Klára Tasovská, prod. Lukáš Kokeš, CZ, SK)
DOK Preview Award
Mastery (dir. Kateřina Turečková, prod. Klára Mamojková, Wanda Kaprálová, Vít Janeček, CZ)
DAE Encouragement Prize
One for the Team (dir. Katarzyna Wiśniowska, prod. Tomasz Morawski, Marcin Kupiecki, PL)
Swarm (dir. Ula Sowa, prod. Viktoria Szabo, PL, HU).
Pitch the Doc Award
Blix (dir. Greta Stocklassa, prod. Radovan Síbrt, CZ, SE)
