Archive for the 'Awards' Category
Kartemquin Educational Films, an award-winning Chicago-based documentary production company is among eight non-profits that have won this year’s MacArthur’s Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. Kartemquin will spend the $500,000 on organisational development and on the creation of a fellowship fund for minority filmmakers.
Kartemquin’s best known documentary film, Hoop Dreams (see photo), has won every major critics prize and journalism award in 1995 and was named on over 150 “ten best” lists. The film examines the complex role basketball plays in the lives of two inner-city high school players. After garnering the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Hoop Dreams was released theatrically by Fine Line Features and became the highest grossing documentary that year.
Continue reading ‘Kartemquin Films receives MacArthur award’
The award-winning documentary “War/Dance” was screened last night in a joint film event by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Directed by the husband-and-wife team Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, “War/Dance” focuses on a group of children in a northern Ugandan refugee camp, who had escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army.
The documentary film tells the story of three exceptional children and their school in the Patongo refugee camp as they take an historic journey to compete in the annual Kampala Music Festival. Fifty-six schools compete, but only one will go home the champion. No one expects it to be Patongo – schools in the middle of refugee camps don’t win awards.
“The music helps them forget,” said Patongo’s head teacher in the film. The war has stolen so much: their homes, their parents, their childhoods. Patongo’s refugee camp packs 60,000 people in its endless squalor. Close to half of the primary school students had been abducted and forced at gunpoint to beat or kill neighbors, other children and sometimes even their own parents.
Continue reading ‘Documentary screens on Uganda’s child soldiers’
One World is currently accepting nominations for its prestigious One World Media Awards until 16 March. Each year the awards attract an extensive range of high-quality entries and One World expect 2007 to be no different. They particularly welcome contributions from small or lesser known independent media companies and from individuals.
Entries should be concerned with social, political, or cultural aspects of the developing world – Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East or the former Soviet States. Entries must have been broadcast on terrestrial, cable or satellite TV or published in a recognised publication for the first time in the UK between 18 March 2006 and 17 March 2007. As ever, the ceremony will be hosted by Jon Snow and takes place on Thursday 14th June at The Porchester Hall in Bayswater, London.
For more info, visit the One World page.
Last night, Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” took home the Oscar for Best Feature Documentary, while the Documentary Short award went to Chinese American filmmaker Ruby Yang for “Blood of the Yingzhou District”.
The latter follows a 4-year-old Chinese AIDS orphan (also carrier of the virus) who is taken in by his eldest uncle after the death of his parents. The film reveals how traditional obligations of kinship collide with the terror of the disease, and how these forces play out in the boy’s search for a family to call his own. You can read more about the film here. 
Swiss director Eric Bergkraut’s documentary “Coca: la Colombe de Tchétchénie” was given the prestigious International Human Rights Movie Award last night at the 6th Cinema for Peace Festival in Berlin. The film tells the story of a Chechen militant woman, Sainap Gaschaiewa.
The film has already screened at over 20 international festivals, including Tribeca, Amsterdam, Montreal, Tallinn, Tehran, Warsaw and Prague. The French newspaper Télérama has described it as a “militant documentary with a rare intensity [which] denounces the unsupportable inertia of European democracies”. Currently on release in Germany and France.
The jury and audience award-winners of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival were announced last night (January 28) in Park City, Utah. Here are the results in the documentary category.
The Grand Jury Prize: Documentary was given to “Manda Bala” (“Send a bullet”), directed by Jason Kohn. In Brazil, known as one of the world’s most corrupt and violent countries, “Manda Bala” follows a politician who uses a frog farm to steal billions of dollars, a wealthy businessman who spends a small fortune bullet-proofing his cars, and a plastic surgeon who reconstructs the ears of mutilated kidnapping victims.
The World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary was given to “Enemies of Happiness”, directed by Eva Mulvad and Anja Al Erhayem (Denmark). The film follows Malalai Joya, a 28-year-old Afghani woman, as she redefines the role of women and elected officials with her historic 2005 victory in Afghanistan’s first democratic election in over 30 years.
Continue reading ‘2007 Sundance winners announced’
“Deliver Us From Evil” exposes paedophilia and corruption at the Catholic church through the story of “Father” Oliver O’Grady, whose abusive behaviour in the 1970s was covered up by the Church. Directed by Amy Berg, the film has been nominated for an Oscar and has been picked up by Lions Gate distribution.
Former Roman Catholic priest Oliver O’Grady was convicted in 1993 on four counts of lewd and lascivious acts on minors. During the film, O’Grady details how he preyed on children, how the Diocese of Stockton, California, knew about the abuse, and how church officials covered up his case for two decades by moving him from parish to parish.
“I want to promise myself this is going to be the most honest confession of my life,” O’Grady says in the film. “And in doing that, I need to make a long journey back, understanding what I did and to acknowledge that. And in some ways make reparations for that.” The filming of O’Grady takes place in Dublin, Ireland, where he is now a free man after serving seven years in prison.
Continue reading ‘Church paedophilia film gets Oscar nomination’
