Idfa Awards 2012
Sometimes you are lucky because normally you leave a festival having NOT seen the winner. Not this year where this blogger was privileged to take part in the idfacademy where the first point on the agenda was a screening of Alan Berliner’s ”First Cousin Once Removed” that tonight received the prize for Best Feature-Length Documentary at idfa 2012. A great film as you can read on this site. The jury argumented that ”Alan Berliner employs intelligence, inventiveness and a poetic sensibility to create a film that uses the onset on Alzheimer’s to make a beautiful, moving and artistic statement about the intersection of personal history and memory.”
The award for Best Mid-Length Documentary was given to “Red Wedding” by Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, “the poignant story of Cambodian Sochan Pen, who as a sixteen-year-old was forced to marry a soldier of the Khmer Rouge”, the First Appearance prize went to Dutch Esther Herzog for “Soldier on the Roof”, “a film providing insight into everday lives in the Jewish enclave in Hebron, where 800 colonists live among their 120,000 Palestian neighbours.”
Have not watched these two films, but a salute to the juries that gave two prizes to Malik Bendjelloul for his well-known “Searching for Sugarman” and to the wonderful “Pablo’s Winter” by Chico Pereira, that was also at DOKLeipzig, where the filmkommentaren correspondent had these words to put forward: Another character who is charismaric in his old, grumpy age is Pablo, a pensioned miner… a warm film that perfectly catches the rythm of moving slowly around, having time to argue with the wife and teach a kid how to bicycle.
Another bravo to a film that was presented in a rough cut session at DocsBarcelona this February: ”The IDFA DOC U Award, worth (€ 1,500) and awarded by a jury of young people, went to Marcel Barrena for Little World (Spain), about nineteen-year-old Albert who travels in his wheelchair, with his girlfriend but without any money, to the other side of the world.” I said hello to Albert at idfa, what a role model he is!
