Amber Fares’ “Coexistence, My Ass!” took home the prize for Best Rough Cut during the awards ceremony for Forum, the industry section of documentary film festival IDFA, on Wednesday. Mohammed Almughanni’s “Son of the Streets” won the award for Best Pitch, and the DocLab award went to “Turbulence” by Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts.
“Militantropos,” created by a collective of Maksym Nakonechnyi, Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi, received the Rough Cut Award Honorable Mention.
The festival’s head of industry office Adriek van Nieuwenhuyzen opened the ceremony by underscoring the need for dialogue. “I hope when you go home, you leave what we like to call the hope for documentary in good spirits, and that you feel that you have been listened to and that we have had good conversations. I know times are not easy, but I hope you can continue speaking, listening and trying to understand each other’s positions.”
Jury members Tiny Mungwe and Patricia Finneran got emotional when awarding “Coexistence, My Ass!,” a project about activist-comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi’s one-woman show. “We cannot deny the pain and horror of this moment. In the documentary community, we can interrogate the role of art and storytelling to recognize our place in history, to process and to make meaning of the unfathomable,” read their statement.
“This all-women filmmaking team from diverse backgrounds is grappling with the core root of human conflict — how we see ‘the other.’ This story of a risk-taking young comedienne who challenges the status quo and questions ‘what are the limits of comedy amidst conflict?’ explores the complex and often fraught power of comedy as social commentary.”
While awarding “Son of the Streets,” a project about a stateless Palestinian child in a Beirut refugee camp, jury members Zdeněk Blaha and Nada Riyadh highlighted how they would like to support “not only a specific aspiring talent but also a cause.”
In a statement, they said: “If there was one project that needs support at this moment the most, it is this one. We would like to recognize the struggle of a nation forced to live as ghosts caught between the walls, without home, without identity, without land.” The jury applauded “the courage of an ethical North-South co-production to tell a cinematic story when the world is not listening.”
With regards to “Militantropos,” a Ukrainian project investigating the powerful impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on personal behavior, the Rough Cut jury said: “We live in a world where violent conflict is ever-present, recorded on cell phones with images shared on social media in a torrent of media chaos. At the same time, there are filmmakers willing to take risks and give their time to document history and shape the narrative of these times. Some of these films will transcend documentation and become cinema.”
The DocLab jury members, Ana Brzezińska and Judith Okonkwo, praised “Turbulence,” a mixed reality project drawn from an artist’s experience of a chronic vestibular disability, for “proposing a critical and compassionate conversation about technology through the lens of disability, and for offering us a generous insight into a personal experience that reminds us that there is a multitude of realities in every human being we encounter.”
