Silverdocs Documentary Festival/2

The Washington based festival ended last night and awards were announced – all together $76.500 in cash and in-kind, as the festival site announces. The three main awards were given to (for best US feature) ”Our School” by Mona Nicoara and Miruna Coco-Cozma, (for best world feature) ”Family Instinct” by young Latvian Andris Gauja and (for best short film) ”Guanape Sur” by German Janos Richter.

The two latter have previously been noticed on this site – ”Family Instinct” (photo) is with the words of the festival ” a unique chronicle of family gone awry, … an unsparing exploration of a Latvian household built on the incestuous relationship between Zanda and her imprisoned brother Valdis, whose pending homecoming creates tremendous frisson.”

“Guanape Sur” is a tremendous success story for Janos Richter and his cameraman Jakob Stark. They left the Zelig film school last year and their film has been travelling the world of festivals since then. The jury at Silverdocs said: “We were won over by the stark beauty of the images, which take us into a world of extreme hardship. The formal restraint of the filmmaking coupled with complex sound design create a poetic yet unflinching meditation on human beings’ constraint by their environment.”

http://silverdocs.com/news-links/2011/06/25/silverdocs-announces-award-winners/

Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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