The 18th Camden International Film Festival on Maine’s mid-coast – an more and more necessary vacation spot for documentary filmmakers – wrapped its in-person portion Sunday after asserting a handful of awards.
Day After…, directed by Kamar Ahmad Simon, gained the pageant’s Harrell Award, chosen from a gaggle of “some of the most significant documentaries of the year.” The movie is described as “A philosophical ballad along the rivers of Bangladesh, transporting the rich and poor, young and old, East and West in a century-old paddle steamer.”
“The jury was unanimous in its admiration for this film, in which an old riverboat seems to contain an entire society’s worth of dreamers and hustlers, politicians and radicals,” juror Eric Hynes mentioned, noting that the documentary employs “both hybrid techniques and dogged observational power. This is a dazzling work of nonfiction.”
CIFF/Points North Institute
The jury awarded a particular point out to Polaris, one other movie with a nautical theme. Juror Assia Boundaoui described it as “a beautifully shot film that moves gracefully from the vast expanse of the Arctic Ocean to a glimpse into the innermost life of a woman bravely charting troubled waters. Director Ainara Vera wields her camera lovingly and weaves a moving and intimate portrait of a captain struggling with love.”
Another particular point out was awarded to Foragers, directed by Jumana Manna, a movie documenting “elderly Palestinians… caught between the right to forage their own land and the harsh restrictions imposed by their occupiers on the basis of preservation.”
Juror Jessica Kingdon (an Oscar nominee earlier this 12 months for her function documentary Ascension) described Foragers as a “surprisingly whimsical portrait of a people and their tumultuous relationship with land and state. We loved the creative use of reenactments and archival footage.”
CIFF/Points North Institute
CIFF additionally introduced awards in its Cinematic Vision class. The high prize there went to Detours, a movie set in Moscow directed by Ekaterina Selenkina.
“This film moved us for its eloquence in form and scope, as well as its insightful, engaging mixing of film materiality, the digital and physical mixing in the same way as they do in the lives depicted here,” mentioned the jury, comprised of Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, and Abby Sun. “It simultaneously challenges both the audiences’ expectations of form, as well as that of the surveillance state under which it is filmed.”
The jury gave an honorable point out to Terranova, directed by Alejandro Alonso and Alejandro Pérez, a movie described within the CIFF program as “a sensorial journey through the dream-like images and sounds of Havana, Cuba.”
A particular point out went to H, directed by Carlos Pardo Ros, which the jurors known as “a film that creates an experience out of memory, transcending the material to evoke mortality and the distance or proximity amongst us. A cinema of risk, of extreme courage and exploration.”
Netflix/Participant
Out of competitors, the pageant screened numerous award-winning movies, together with the Netflix documentary Descendant, directed by Margaret Brown; National Geographic’s The Territory, a movie directed by Alex Pritz on an Indigenous tribe in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest that’s trying to maintain landgrabbers at bay, and All That Breathes, from HBO Documentary Films, Shaunak Sen’s function that gained the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance and the highest documentary prize at Cannes.
Fresh from its world premiere in Venice, Steve James’s A Compassionate Spy screened at Camden. On Her Shoulders got here from its world premiere at TIFF to CIFF; the movie directed by Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen, and govt produced by Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, paperwork Zarifa Ghafari, who in her mid-20s grew to become “one of Afghanistan’s first female mayors, and the youngest to ever hold the position.”
CIFF continues as a digital expertise by means of September 25.
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