Ji.hlava unveiled its winning films October 29. Photophobia by Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík took home the Best Czech Documentary award, while the Opus Bonum award for Best World Documentary went to Elvis Lenić’s Shipfrom Croatia.
Maia Gattás Vargas, the Argentine director, was honoured an award for the original approach, and Hungarian director Béla Tarr received recognition for his contribution to world cinema.
The Ji.hlava IDFF also announced plans to expand the live part of the festival from six to ten days starting next year. “We want to provide greater comfort for our audience. This will free up accommodation capacity, which will be available to more festival guests and visitors. The extension will also result in a greater number of screenings, allowing us to have up to four screenings of a single film,” said festival director Marek Hovorka.
Ji.hlava Online will run until November 12 and will offer more than one hundred seventy films from this year’s live festival programme. Audiences will have the opportunity to watch not only most of the award-winning films but also the most interesting selections that Ji.hlava presented this year. All films from the programme will be available for viewing until midnight on November 12th, but only within the territory of the Czech Republic.
OPUS BONUM AWARDS
- Best World Documentary Film 2023 Winner: Ship (dir. Elvis Lenić / Croatia, 2023). Jury statement: For creating a sweeping, deeply researched and visually stunning account of a Croatian shipyard whose rise and fall reflect the political fortunes of the former Yugoslavia.
- Best Central and East European Documentary Film 2023: Distances (dir. Matej Bobrik / Poland, 2023). Jury statement: For producing an intimate, unflinching depiction of a single family struggling to survive the wrenching experience of migration – from Nepal to Poland.
- Best Film from the Visegrad region: The Third End of the Stick (dir. Jaro Vojtek / Slovakia, 2023) Jury statement: For offering a richly nuanced mosaic of life within some Slovak Roma settlements, focusing on the daily struggles for financial, physical and psychological wellbeing.
- Best debut: You Will Never See It All (dir. Štěpán Pech / Czech Republic, Slovakia, 2023). Jury statement: For the creation of a complex portrait of a visual artist that succeeds in representing the intensity and variety of the work, the shock of the artist’s premature death and its impact on the family who survive him.
- Original approach: East Wind (dir. Maia Gattás Vargas / Argentina, 2023). Jury statement: For the creation of a filmmaker’s cinematic search for a father she never knew, an exploration that couples poetry with politics via the reclamation of her Palestinian cultural identity.
- Student Jury Award: La Reine (dir. Nikola Klinger / Czech Republic, 2023). Jury statement: This film combines captivating visuals, sensitive storytelling, and interaction between the director and protagonists. It creates a space for sharing personal traumas and opens up timeless themes of freedom, rebellion, and life on the edge of society.
CZECH JOY
- Best Czech Documentary Film 2023 Winner: Photophobia (dir. Ivan Ostrochovský, Pavol Pekarčík / Slovakia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, 2023). Jury statement: From the appalling reality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine the authors of the film created a poetic and cinematically impressive vision of the childhood world. We value the courage to film in such challenging conditions. Through scenes of personal tragedies, the form of the film Photophobia establishes the unbreakable will of the heroic people of Ukraine to persevere and to prevail. The universal dimension of the film urgently reminds us of the scale and extent of other war conflicts, from the refugee crisis to the horror in Gaza, which test not only the attitudes of filmmakers, but also the conscience of Europe.
- Special mention: My Paradise Is Darker Than Your Hell (dir. Kateřina Dudová / Czech Republic, 2023). Jury statement: A raw and uncompromising exploration of the roots of self-destructiveness.
- Best editing: Satan Among Us (dir. Martin Ježek / Czech Republic, 2023) Jury statement: For performative editing of parasitic qualities.
- Best sound design: Satan Among Us (dir. Martin Ježek / Czech Republic, 2023). Jury statement: For the Faustian vibrations of the collective shadow.
- Best cinematography: Bedwetter (dir. Jan Hušek / Czech Republic, 2023). Jury statement: For cinematography that connects the failed attempts of maturing from a boy into a man with the motion of a falling pinecone.
- Original approach: Notes from Eremocene (dir. Viera Čákanyová / Slovakia, Czech Republic, 2023). Jury statement: The film is a powerful personal testament which critically examines such urgent phenomena as the ongoing climate crisis or the rapid development of technology. The director sends her message into the future – which, though uncertain, is shaped by all of us. Here and now.
- Student Jury Award: The World According to My Dad (dir. Marta Kovářová / Czech Republic, Slovakia, 2023). Jury statement: A playful film addressing a topical theme, in which the author narrates with unprecedented charm the complicated journey of a father and daughter in search of enlightenment for the whole world.
TESTIMONIES
- Best Film Testimony 2023 Winner: MIGHTY AFRIN: in the time of floods (dir. Angelos Rallis / France, Greece, 2023). Jury statement: A powerful story of a resilient young girl challenged with the loss of her home and family due to rising water levels which gives us a deep insight into the fate of hundreds of millions of people facing the consequences of climate change.
- Special mention: One Of The Thousand Hills (dir. Bernard Bellefroid / Belgium, 2023). Jury statement: After the worst genocide since WWII we see difficult a delicate process of peace and forgiveness.
- Special mention: Not That Kind Of Guy (dir. Signe Rosenlund-Hauglid / Norway, 2022). Jury statement: The topic in the essence transcends beyond sexual relationship to general male-female personal interaction. Representing both perspectives of victims and perpetrators.
FASCINATIONS
- Best Experimental Documentary Film 2023 Winner: Silhouette (dir. Yoshiki Nishimura / Japan, 2023). Jury statement: Using the technical tools of recording and then analysing the world around us, the film gives us the chance to experience something as ordinary as a morning walk with the dog. The light imprints a shadow on the pavement, leaving a mark of a daily meditation. The scanning of reality becomes a poetic gesture that brings an irreplaceable experience of confronting the world around us.
- Special mention: BLUE (dir. Violena Ampudia / Cuba, Belgium, 2023). Jury statement: A piece of visual poetry processing the incredibly tough and still often taboo subject of postpartum depression, and in doing so becomes a tool to help the women themselves. A participative therapy session that takes you through the surface of sound and in turn allows the audience to immerse themselves in a 16 min snippet of a women’s personal story.
- Special mention: Dinosauria, We (dir. Maxime-Claude L’Écuyer / Canada, 2023). Jury statement: The unsettling flow of fast-paced archival images immediately and irreversibly draws the viewer into a post-apocalyptic vision of a possible future that grows inevitably closer with each passing year. An unstoppable 35mm explosive charge.
FASCINATIONS: EXPRMNTL.CZ
- Best Czech Experimental Documentary Film 2023 Winner: The Commodity Catalogue (dir. Zbyněk Baladrán / Czech Republic, 2023) Jury statement: A film whose visuality thematises itself, bringing us an almost physical experience through the cataloguing of concepts that constantly and repeatedly question themselves. A VHS uroboros that endlessly absorbs its own self.
- Special mention: But Not for Ever (dir. Anežka Horová, Klára Trsková / Czech Republic, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe, 2023). Jury statement: A twofold walk through the places of memory shows in a subtly poetic way how fragile the world around us can be. Unforgettable images of a greenhouse where nature takes back its own and literally defeats the dictatorship that we know is often around us. But not forever.
- Special mention: One Sol in the Life of Curiosity (dir. Vít Růžička / Czech Republic, 2023). Jury statement: 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds. One Sol, during which the author lets us empathically experience the inner and outer journey of an aging rover on Mars, whose view of the great unknown tells us much more about ourselves than any scientific research.
AUDIENCE AWARD 2023
- Winner: Is There Any Place For Me, Please? (dir. Jarmila Štuková / Czech Republic, 2023)
SHORT JOY
- Best Short Documentary Film 2023 Winner: Kata’s Motherhood (dir. Santwana Bayaskar / Hungary, Belgium, Portugal, India, 2023)
BEST VR PROJECT
- Winner: Missing Pictures: Naomi Kawase (dir. Clément Deneux / France, United Kingdom, Taiwan, South Korea, Luxembourg, 2022). Jury statement: As the jury we decided to give the main prize for VR experiences to a piece that uses the potential of the medium to it’s fullest: a real-time interactive experience that gives the viewer freedom of movement and a sense of participating in the story, that allows us to (re)imagine not only situations that we were not a part of, but also ones that never came to be. Documenting a feature film in the langue of animation with a playful use of scale as well as presence, “Missing Pictures: Naomi Kawase” by Clément Deneux allows us to imagine the characters, their development and moments of change, all in a story that is meticulously produced, well paced, and touching: on the one hand the imagined story appears in small scale, as a live world to peek into, but engulfing, and including the viewer at the moment of change, on the other hand the director/narrator appears in the story in well crafted volumetric capture. A fantastic addition to an already acclaimed series.
- Special mention: Flow VR (dir. Adriaan Lokmaan / Netherlands, France, 2023). Jury statement: We need to highlight an excellent VR video that shows how sensuous experiences, such as the caress of water on the skin, can be felt with just visuals and music in a documentary manner – this is Flow by Adriaan Lokman.
- Special mention: The Man Who Couldn’t Leave (dir. Singing Chen / Taiwan, 2022). Jury statement: We award the honorable mention to a VR movie for pushing 360 video to its limits, in depicting historical events: The Man Who Couldn’t Leave by Singing Chen.
CONTRIBUTION TO WORLD CINEMA AWARD 2023
- Béla Tarr
THE BEST FESTIVAL POSTER AWARD
- Festival Identity: Trieste Film Festival 2023
- Audience Choice: Visions du Réel 2023 ver. 1 / ver. 2 / ver. 3
