The Cannes Film Festival may not be as dedicated to doc as to fiction, but nevertheless many from the international documentary community congregate every year at Cannes Docs, the dedicated non-fiction division of the Marché du film. Which makes CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator’s participation within the Docs-in-Progress Showcase programme all the more impactful, with the organisation having won three major prizes in three years.
Earlier this week Twice Colonized by Lin Alluna won the IEFTA Award, valued at €10,000. The same prize was won in 2021 by Maja Doroteja Prelog for her CIRCLE project Cent’Anni, and in 2020 Anna Nemes picked up the Nordisk Panorama IMPACT Award for Beauty of the Beast, about female body builders. (What’s more The Eclipse by Nataša Urban, which was workshopped at CIRCLE in 2018, won the DOX:AWARD at this year’s CPH:DOX.)
Now entering its fifth year, CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator is a training program for women documentary filmmakers who are developing a project with international potential. The tri-module event is designed both for talented directors and producers who are in the process of developing their first feature-length documentary, as well as for more established authors, who are given the opportunity to further improve their skills and develop their projects.
“The collaboration with Cannes Docs is actually very important for several reasons. One, because we work in the regular programme with filmmakers with new and emerging voices, trying to support them to articulate their voices before they step into international markets, trying to help them get acclimatized to meeting all these industry people,” says CIRCLE founder Biljana Tutorov of the participants’ immersion into the heart of Cannes activity.
“It was also good to be live together in Cannes and to meet people, but also for our filmmakers it’s good to be here because to be part of a big celebration of cinema. Even though the festival is not focused solely on documentary, it’s good to feel that we are part of the cinema story and the cinema history. And thanks to the efforts of Cannes Docs, it’s a very good meeting point for the industry.”
Earlier this year Tutorov and co-director Petar Glomazić picked up the €20,000 Eurimages co-production prize at CPH:DOX for their project The Last Nomads, a co-production between Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Belgium and France.
In the project Gara and her adopted 12-year-old daughter Nada live off herding and cheesemaking in their mountain cabin in rural Montenegro. Their routine is interrupted by a newly established military testing ground, threatening the environment, people and the local tradition. Gara stands up to defend the land of her ancestors by challenging the ruling government and the patriarchal tradition, hoping for the unity of locals, anthropologists and activists, as the case reaches both the EU Parliament and UNESCO.
The film is produced by Wake Up Films (Serbia) and Cut-Up (Montenegro) and co-produced with Les Films de l’Oeil sauvage (France), Kinematograf (Croatia) and Cvinger film (Slovenia). In addition to the Eurimages prize, it has received development funding nods from the Catapult Film Fund and Chicken and Egg Pictures. The producers are aiming for festival selection from January 2024 onwards. World sales are handle by Syndicado.
Initially the film was going to focus on the mother and daughter and their bucolic existence in the highlands of Montenegro, but when the filmmakers heard that the land was earmarked for military testing, the project shifted in emphasis. “The land is protected by UNESCO and is one of the most unique biodiversities in Europe and the second largest pastureland in Europe,” says Tutorov of the threat posed to its future, adding how the terrain is also populated with huge flocks of livestock.
“In addition, we kept following Gara and her daughter and five other kids, but then we discovered that it’s also a family with very interesting dynamics. Not all the children were hers. She also adopted children from her sister that was murdered in family violence. So these two stories started to intertwine,” Tutorov adds.
The editor on the project is the Belgian Marie-Hélène Dozo who has edited many Dardennes Brothers films (including the Cannes 2022 Competition film Tori and Lokita) and with Roberto Minervini on titles such as What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire? (2018) and Stop The Pounding Heart (2013). “ Marie-Hélène fell in love with The Last Nomads,” says Tutorov.
Montenegrin co-director Petar Glomazić underlines the necessity of making the film. “First of all, this place where we are filming is a gem of nature. It’s a beautiful place, which is in UNESCO protection, and it is an obvious violence against nature to establish a military training ground in the middle of this beautiful biodiversity. On the other side, the people who are living there are from a very long and beautiful tradition, which should be the heritage of humanity, because their way of life is a really old one,” Glomazić says, adding that the symbiosis between the way of life of the locals and land they work is also something that must be protected.
“In our film, we have two stories. It is the violence against nature and violence against women because in our very traditional society women have been abused for generations,” he adds. “The personal story of our main protagonists is really tragic and important to be told to others. And those are the people who are protecting the nature. So we have victims protecting another victim – their mountain home they call Mother, because it has fed them across generations.”
