The 18th Camden Worldwide Movie Pageant 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 competition’s Harrell Award, chosen from a gaggle of “a few of the most vital documentaries of the yr.” The movie is described as “A philosophical ballad alongside the rivers of Bangladesh, transporting the wealthy and poor, younger and outdated, East and West in a century-old paddle steamer.”
“The jury was unanimous in its admiration for this movie, through which an outdated riverboat appears to include a whole society’s price of dreamers and hustlers, politicians and radicals,” juror Eric Hynes stated, noting that the documentary employs “each hybrid methods and dogged observational energy. This can be a dazzling work of nonfiction.”
CIFF/Factors 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 fantastically shot movie that strikes gracefully from the huge expanse of the Arctic Ocean to a glimpse into the innermost lifetime of a girl bravely charting troubled waters. Director Ainara Vera wields her digicam lovingly and weaves a transferring and intimate portrait of a captain scuffling with love.”
One other particular point out was awarded to Foragers, directed by Jumana Manna, a movie documenting “aged Palestinians… caught between the appropriate to forage their very own land and the tough restrictions imposed by their occupiers on the premise of preservation.”
Juror Jessica Kingdon (an Oscar nominee earlier this yr for her function documentary Ascension) described Foragers as a “surprisingly whimsical portrait of a individuals and their tumultuous relationship with land and state. We beloved the artistic use of reenactments and archival footage.”
CIFF/Factors North Institute
CIFF additionally offered awards in its Cinematic Imaginative and prescient class. The highest prize there went to Detours, a movie set in Moscow directed by Ekaterina Selenkina.
“This movie moved us for its eloquence in type and scope, in addition to its insightful, partaking mixing of movie materiality, the digital and bodily mixing in the identical manner as they do within the lives depicted right here,” stated the jury, comprised of Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, and Abby Solar. “It concurrently challenges each the audiences’ expectations of type, in addition to that of the surveillance state underneath which it’s 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 via the dream-like photographs and sounds of Havana, Cuba.”
A particular point out went to H, directed by Carlos Pardo Ros, which the jurors known as “a movie that creates an expertise out of reminiscence, transcending the fabric to evoke mortality and the gap or proximity amongst us. A cinema of threat, of maximum braveness and exploration.”
Netflix/Participant
Out of competitors, the competition screened various award-winning movies, together with the Netflix documentary Descendant, directed by Margaret Brown; Nationwide 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 Movies, Shaunak Sen’s function that gained the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance and the highest documentary prize at Cannes.
Recent 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 turned “one in all Afghanistan’s first feminine mayors, and the youngest to ever maintain the place.” Sr., in the meantime, premiered at Telluride earlier than making its technique to Camden. That’s the Chris Smith movie that explores the work of director Robert Downey Sr. and his relationship along with his son, actor Robert Downey Jr.
CIFF continues as a digital expertise via September 25.
