The 12 feature documentaries in the running for the 2023 European Film Awards (EFAs) have been revealed.
Scroll down for full list of titles
They include Mati Diop’s Dahomey, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in February. The film tracks the journey of 26 plundered royal treasures from the former West African kingdom of Dahomey exhibited in Paris, now being returned to Benin. French filmmaker Diop was previously nominated for a European Discovery Award at the EFAs with her Cannes 2019 award-winner Atlantics.
Titles that premiered at Berlin make up nearly half the total selection and also include At Averroes & Rosa Parks by France’s Nicolas Philibert, who previously won the documentary prize at the EFAs in 2002 with To Be And To Have and was nominated last year with Golden Bear-winner On The Adamant.
No Other Land, which won the Berlinale Documentary Award and Panorama audience award, has also made the shortlist. Directed by Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, it deals with the Palestine-Israel conflict and also won audience awards at Visions du Reel and CPH:DOX as well as the Tim Hetherington Award at Sheffield DocFest.
Also shortlisted is Berlin Encounters Award-winner Direct Action, by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, and Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet, which premiered in Panorama at Berlin and went on to win the Golden Alexander and Fipresci Prize at Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival.
Further award-winners include Johan Grimonprez’s Soundtrack To A Coup D’etat, which scooped the world cinema documentary special jury award for cinematic innovation at Sundance in January, and Nicole Vögele’s The Landscape And The Fury, winner of the grand prix in the international feature film competition at Visions du Reel.
Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias, which premiered at last year’s Venice’s Giornate degli Autori and won the Grierson Award for best documentary at the BFI London Film Festival, has also made the cut.
The selection covers nine European countries, and the shortlist of nominations will be announced on November 5, based on votes by the European Film Academy’s 5,000 members. Last year’s winner of the documentary prize was Smoke Sauna Sisterhood by Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints.
Eligible for the EFAs are European documentaries which, among other criteria, had their first official screening between June 1, 2023 and May 31, 2024 and have a European director. The first wave of features selected for this year’s awards were revealed earlier this month.
The 37th European Film Awards will be presented at a ceremony on December 7 in Lucerne.
EFAs 2024 Documentary Selection
At Averroes & Rosa Parks (Fr)
Dir. Nicolas Philibert
Bye Bye Tiberias (Fr-Bel-Pal-Qat)
Dir. Lina Soualem
Dahomey (Fr-Sen)
Dir. Mati Diop
Direct Action (Ger-Fr)
Dirs. Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell
In Limbo (Pol)
Dir. Alina Maksimenko
Marching In The Dark (Bel-Neth-India)
Dir. Kinshuk Surjan
My Stolen Planet (Ger)
Dir. Farahnaz Sharifi
No Other Land (Pal-Nor)
Dirs. Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal
Pelikan Blue (Hun)
Dir. Laszlo Csaki
Soundtrack To A Coup D’etat (Fr-Bel-Neth)
Dir. Johan Grimonprez
The Landscape And The Fury (Switz)
Dir. Nicole Vögele
The Words Women Spoke One Day (Fr)
Dir. Raphael Pillosio
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