Doc Alliance, a network of 7 of the most influential European documentary film festivals, announced May 24 the winners of its 15th annual Doc Alliance Awards during Doc Day of the Festival de Cannes.
The Best Feature award went to A Night of Knowing Nothing by Payal Kapadia and In the Billowing Night won for Best Short. Nataša Urban’s The Eclipse received a Special Mention.
The directors of the awarded films receive a total of €8,000 (€5,000 EUR for Best Feature and €5,000 for Best Short) to be spent on their next projects. Additionally, the Doc Alliance festivals have committed to screen at least 3 of the nominated films at their upcoming editions. A selection of the nominated films are available to watch on Doc Alliance’s online platform DAFilms.com, in specific territories.
Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (France/India), nominated by FIDMarseille, centres on L, a university student in India, who writes letters to her estranged lover while he is away. It is through these letters that we get a glimpse into her daily life and the life of her fellow students, along with the drastic changes taking place around them. Through fragments of L’s observations, an image of Indian youth comes to light. A Night of Knowing Nothing premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight 2021, where it won the L’Œil d’or award for Best Documentary.
The jury praised Kapadia’s “emotionally and artistically packed documentary,” calling the film “an intimate yet political portrayal of modern Indian youth, all the while observing the alteration of the Indian scapes, its modifications, its need for change, but also its nostalgia.”
In the feature-length category, the jury also extended a Special Mention to The Eclipse by Nataša Urban (nominated by CPH:DOX) for its “masterful assemblage of intimate audio statements as well as exquisite images” that have “the ability to take the spectator on a unique mountain hike where one can feel not only at home but also uneasy”.
The Doc Alliance Award – Best Short 2022 went to In the Billowing Night (France) by Erika Etangsalé, also nominated by FIDMarseille. Retracing the footsteps of her ancestors, questioning her identity through the story of her father, first-time director Erika Etangsalé weaves a story of silence, dark dreams, mysterious pain and muted violence. Shot between Reunion Island and Mâcon, Erika Etangsalé elicits a voice that recalls, in halftones and whispers, the memory of slavery and the whiff of colonialism from a not so distant policy, which remains a blind spot in the history of France.
The jury applauded the film “for getting as much as possible out of cinematic paradoxes, making a movie epic in scope and intimate in tone, short but built around fleshed out concepts; for visual and narrative flair in an unflinching service of world, its characters and their memories; for showing us that painful experiences and impassive wheels of history are always a part of a much larger and much more complicated picture.”
