Films which have already been appreciated and awarded
The series "Festival Award Winners" is an opportunity to see the films which have already been appreciated and awarded at prestigious documentary and short film festivals around the world.
This year, we will watch five documentary films by recognised film-makers, in which one can distinguish two dominating motifs: family stories and stories about madness.
In "Probation Time" the director Avigail Sperber tells the story of her extraordinary, numerous family: her mum Hannah, her father Daniel (rabbi) and her eight siblings. The main thread of the film is the tumultuous fate of the adoptive sister Ariela, but the director also records her own problems: splitting up with her partner and being a single parent.
The film by the esteemed director Alexander Nanau "Toto and his sisters" is in turn a poignant, though not devoid of optimistic elements, story of three siblings: ten-year-old Totonel, seventeen-year-old Ana and fourteen-year-old Andrea. The sisters live with their brother in a gypsy ghetto on the outskirts of Bucharest while their mother is doing time for drug trafficking.
Hanna Polak, nominated for the Academy Award for the film "The Children of Leningradsky" (2005), in her film "Something better to come" again goes with her camera to the world of children left on their own. She spent 14 years accompanying Julka, who lives on the dumping ground, and following the events from her life and the life of her close ones. From the first cigarette to unplanned pregnancy.
What is a mental illness and how the perception of it changed (or did not change) in African countries and what methods are used to cure it – shows the film "Remnance of Madness" (dir. Joris Lachaise). Among others, Khady Sylla (deceased in 2013), a writer and one of the few African directors, who was admitted to the hospital several times, tells her story.
How fluid is the boundary between fiction and documentary, art and illness, madness and suffering? "Suddenly My Thoughts Halt" oscillates between documentary and creative film, the director Jorge Pelicano skillfully shortens the distance towards the patients of the mental hospital in Lisbon, who talk about themselves in a free and honest way, and at the same time participate in preparing a theatre play dedicated to Angelo de Lima, the father of Portuguese modernism.
Kategoria: News.