DocsBarcelona Awards and Numbers
Apart from the already mentioned, see below, main award for Martin Solá’s “The Chechen Family”, the director Marcela Zamora received The Amnesty International Catalunya Award and the Jury’s Special Mention for her touching “The Room of Bones”. It is a film that has this story according to the site of the festival:
“A bold look at the social violence in El Salvador. The mothers who have lost their kids to youth gang wars look for their bodies in the Legal Medicine Institute, where corpses with no names or identifiable relatives pile up daily. During the last decade murdered people have amounted to tens of thousands. Forensic anthropologists in El Salvador face the titanic job of recovering human remains hidden in clandestine graves throughout the country. The majority are young, victims of various types of violence: attacks between youth gangs, people who vanish during their attempt to emigrate to the USA, and inside the deepest graves are victims of the bloody civil war which took place between 1980 and 1992.”
Photo: Marcela Zamora (left) with award and friend Maria Cille, one of many great DocsBarcelona staff members.
Also awarded, again one should say, was Polish Karolina Bielawska for her “Call me Marianna” in the New Talent Category
and Jorge Caballero for “Patient” in the Latitud category. Also this Latin American film deserves to be introduced to a European audience:
“Patient is the word that defines us when we need to follow medical prescriptions or we have to stay calm while we wait. In Colombia, a patient is not only someone who suffers an illness and hopes to overcome it, but also those who take care of that person and fight daily against an absurd bureaucratic system to make sure their loved ones receive what they need. Nubia is patient, and despite living anguished by the loss of her daughter to an aggressive cancer, she manages to navigate with admirable firmness the rambling processes of the Colombian health system.”
DocsBarcelona has screened 46 documentaries and most of the directors and protagonists have been in Barcelona to present their films. The nineteenth edition has increased its viewers by a 30%, overcoming for the first time the barrier of 10,000 spectators (the total assistance will be closed in a few days with DocsBarcelona online final numbers). In addition, the professional activities have gathered 980 professionals and more than 1,300 people have visited the exhibition “Seguir con vida”. (Doctors Without Borders, ed.)
