Cinédoc-Tbilisi Awards 2018
… were many and you can read whoi got what via the link below. My positive comments are that the winners also here were made by directors from or dealing with Eastern and Central Europe. Serbian Mila Turajlic’s “The Other Side of Everything”, winner at IDFA 2017, was a candidate for a prize, the Romanian “Licu” by Ana Dumitrescu, who won at DOKLeipzig 2017, was in the Romanian guest country section – and the main winners were Danish Simon Lereng Wilmont with “The Distant Barking of Dogs”, shot in Eastern Ukraine, followed by Polish Marta Prus with “Over the Limit” and Hungarian Bernadett Tuza-Ritter with her “A Woman Captured”. I have in a previous post praised the winner of the best documentary from Caucasus, “Transparent World” by Vakhtang Guntsev-Gabashvili, Georgian director, who also works in Germany.
Let me stay a while with Bernadett Tuza-Ritter and Marta Prus, who were at the festival and met the audience answering questions that they have probably heard 20 times before. Bravo for coming, taking your time to make, what a festival should be: the meeting between the film, the filmmaker and the audience. And thanks for your ethical dedication to filmmaking. Both are still in contact with their protagonists – Edith from “A Woman Captured” is living with her daughter and grand daughter, working like hell to make ends meet, Margarita from “Over the Limit” has given up the sport, wants to settle down and have a child with her husband…
For me it was especially interesting to hear Marta Prus talk about her five-years-in-the-making of a film, where the first couple of years were spent to get permission to film from the protagonists, the three women, Margarita and her coaches Amina and Irina. She got close with her brilliant cameraman Adam Suzin, ended with 210 hours of material and stayed in the editing room in one year – and took part in several European training programs. “Over the Limit” is the feature length debut of Marta Prus, who before made “Talk to Me” http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/3545/ a fine work, where she showed her big talent, that will bring her to fiction film, she told us, being a true control freak, as she formulated it at the 45 minutes long Q&A.
