AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Fest Metes Out Awards

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Friday, 02 July 2010 02:23

Written by Laura Blum

Serious issues and documentaries go together like Washington, D.C., and its nonfiction scrum, AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival. But this year's fest, which showed about 100 films from 54 countries (June 21 to 27, 2010) at the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Md., gave top awards to stories with a lighter, more intimate touch.

This despite the fact that Silverdocs -- and its five-day International Documentary Conference -- offered up plenty of fodder to "enhance our understanding of the world." With more goo putrefying the Gulf of Mexico each day than the average news consumer can fathom, perhaps jurors and fest-goers sought to buoy their spirits with more manageable, personal narratives than the sobering themes of war, politics and globalization featured on much of the Festival line-up.

Voters among the estimated 25,000 attendees, including more than 1,000 filmmakers, entertainment executives and media professionals, selected Men Who Swim for the feature Audience Award. Dylan Williams' film chronicles a British expat in Sweden who joins a men's synchronized swimming team to cope with his mid-life crisis, ultimately competing in the unofficial All Male World Championship in Milan.

A nostalgic look at the waning of phone booths in Ireland is the topic of the Audience Award-winning short, Bye Bye Now, from Aideen O'Sullivan and Ross Whitaker.

At the Festival awards ceremony, I Love You, Mommy/Wo Ai Ni Mommy took the Sterling Award for Best U.S. Feature. The documentary tracks a Jewish couple's adoption of an 8-year-old Chinese girl, and her new life in Long Island. Director Stephanie Wang-Breal will receive $5,000 in cash.

Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen's Steam of Life won Special Jury Mention. (Together with Men Who Swim, it'd yield a mean double feature of males in water therapy.) Set in the saunas of Finland, Steam of Life lays bare the protagonist's mid-life crisis and the men with whom he swaps hopes and disappointments.

This year’s Sterling Award for Best World Feature went to The Woman with the 5 Elephants. Directed by Vadim Jendreyko, it portrays 85-year-old Svetlana Geier and her Russian-to-German translation of Dostoyevsky’s five great novels, which are dubbed "the five elephants." The prize carries $5,000 cash pot.

The Sterling Award for Best Short Film was awarded to Alan Martin's This Chair Is Not Me, about the director's technology-enabled refusal to let the cerebral palsy that confines him to a wheelchair confine other aspects of his life.

Marwencol  bagged the Cinematic Vision Award. Jeff Malmberg's film trains its lens on Mark Hogancamp, who builds a mini World War II-era village and Nazi-themed narrative as art therapy after sustaining amnesia and physical injuries. Malmberg will enjoy $5,000 of in-kind services from Alpha Cine, a Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera worth another $5,000 and a Sunday Best Barbie® to spice up the toy town.

Garnering Special Jury Mentions were The Kids Grow Up and My Perestroika. In the former, filmmaker Doug Block takes an emotional journey through his daughter's departure for college and his home's transformation into an empty nest. In the latter film, Robin Hessman captures the pangs and aspirations of the last generation of Soviet children to be raised behind the Iron Curtain.

Other Special Jury Mentions honored two shorts, Iris Olsson's Between Dreams, retelling the nocturnal crossing of Siberia by a 100 strangers on a train, and Vance Malone's The Poodle Trainer, which tracks a Russian poodle trainer who has devoted her life to training her 20 brightly festooned poodles.

Budrus snagged the Witness Award, given in honor of Joey R. B. Lozano. The film by Julia Bacha offers a portrait of Palestinian activist Ayed Morrar, an ordinary villager who advocates peaceful transformation. The award carries in-kind marketing support and tickets to the annual Witness Gala hosted by Peter Gabriel.

The Writers Guild of America sister organizations on both coasts garlanded Yael Hersonski with the WGA Documentary Screenplay Award for A Film Unfinished. Hersonski's documentary explores the previously unseen footage from a lost reel of an unfinished Nazi propaganda film about the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw 1942. The award includes a cash prize of $1,000 and a one-year complimentary membership in the WGAW Nonfiction Writers Caucus or WGAE Nonfiction Writers Committee Membership.

Silverdocs Artistic Director Sky Sitney had whittled the Festival program from 2,162 submissions, yielding six world, one international, three North American, five US and 10 east coast premieres, in addition to six retrospective films and an outdoor screening. In a written statement, she thanked the jurors, who included:

Sterling U.S. Feature Jury: Steve Bognar, Filmmaker (A Lion in the House); Michael Palmieri, Filmmaker (October Country); Jenna Rosher, Filmmaker (Junior) and Cinematographer (Jesus Camp)

Sterling World Feature Jury: Simon Kilmurry, Executive Director, American Documentary | POV; Havana Marking, Filmmaker (Afghan Star); Andrea Meditch, Executive Producer (Man on Wire, Grizzly Man)

Sterling Short Film Jury: Ben Fowlie, Founding Director, Camden International Film Festival; Elena Fortes, Director, Ambulante Documentary Film Festival; Aron Gaudet, Filmmaker (The Way We Get By).

For the whole kit and caboodle, see www.silverdocs.com.

AFI-Discovery Channel Silverdocs Documentary Festival
June 21 to 27, 2010
AFI-Silver Theater and Cultural Center
8633 Colesville Road
Silver Spring, MD 20910

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