The jury of the Sarajevo FF Documentary Competition, consisting of Cecilia Lidin (Film Consultant, Denmark), Jean-Pierre Rehm (General Delegate of FIDMarseille – International Cinema Film Festival, France) and Mila Turajlić (Director, Serbia) handed out the doc awards at last night’s (August 19) closing ceremony. The winners are:
Heart of Sarajevo for Best Documantary Film
Landscapes of Resistance, Serbia, Germany, France
Director: Marta Popivoda. Award: €3,000, sponsored by the Government of Switzerland
Landscapes of Resistance traces a journey through the memories of ninety-seven-year-old anti-fascist fighter Sonja, one of the first female partisans in Yugoslavia, who was also among the leaders of the resistance at Auschwitz. As Sonja speaks, we travel through the landscapes of her revolutionary youth as they exist in the present – the Serbian forests and mountains and the muddy terrain of Auschwitz – as well as her tiny Belgrade home, where she lives with her husband and cat.
Special Jury Award
Looking for Horses, Netherlands, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Director: Stefan Pavlović. Award: €2,500
Looking for Horses is about a friendship between the filmmaker and a fisherman who lost his hearing during the Bosnian War and retreated to a lake to live in solitude. The filmmaker, the son of Bosnian parents, struggles to communicate as he lost his mother tongue due to a heavy stutter. Despite their speech and hearing limitations, a bond develops between the young man and the veteran as he shares his world of the lake: full of large catfish, wild horses, vast silences and dangerous thunderstorms.
Special Jury Mention
The Same Dream, Romania
Director: Vlad Petri
A Romanian soldier during his first mission in Afghanistan comes across a wounded Afghan girl and their lives become intertwined from that moment forward. This film, based on a true story, bordering between documentary and fiction, tells the story of a soldier struck by the brutality of war and that of a young girl who found herself in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The director combines archival footage from the most recent war in Afghanistan with videos from his personal archive, in a film about the cruelty of war from the perspective of both the invaders and that of the civilians trapped within.
Human Rights Award
Les Enfants terribles, Turkey, Germany, France
Director: Ahmet Necdet Çupur
Award: €3,000, sponsored by the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
In a village in the south east of Turkey, Mahmut wants to divorce his new wife. At the same time, his sister Zeynep enrols in an open high school and takes a job in a factory. Against her father’s wishes, Zeynep wants to leave the village and eventually attend university. The siblings’ demands become the centre of conflict in their conservative family and community, who are not used to what Mahmut and Zeynep strive for. Intimately captured by their elder brother Ahmet Necdet Çupur, who left the village twenty years ago to pursue his studies, Les Enfants terribles is a story of clashes among generations and between the past and the present.
