Mohammed Almughanni’s Son Of The Streets has won the IDFA Forum award for best pitch, including a €1,500 cash prize, at the co-production and co-financing market of International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) today, November 15.
A co-production between Palestine and Poland, the film follows a stateless Palestinian boy in a Beirut refugee camp who is coming of age while trying to also get documented. It is produced by Glib Lukianets.
“To be a jury at the Forum means seeing lots of great, important, but very different projects. So we had to set up our inner guidelines,” said jury members Zdeněk Blaha and Nada Riyadh.
“With our decision, we would like to support not only a specific aspiring talent but also a cause. If there was one project that needs support at this moment the most, it is this one. We would like to recognise the struggle of a nation forced to live as ghosts caught between the walls. Without home, without identity, without land. But with the courage of an ethical North-South co-production to tell a cinematic story when the world is not listening.”
The €1,500 prize for best rough cut was awarded to Amber Fates’ Coexistence, My Ass! which will receive free closed captioning and subtitles. The US project produced by Rachel Leah Jones, centres around comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi in the midst of staging her political one-woman show.
“This all-women filmmaking team from diverse backgrounds is grappling with the core root of human conflict — how we see ‘the other’,” said the jury, comprised of Tiny Mungwe and Patricia Finneran. “This story of a risk-taking young comedienne who challenges the status quo and questions ‘what are the limits of comedy amidst conflict?’ and explores the complex and often fraught power of comedy as social commentary.”
An honourable mention was given to the Ukrainian war film Militantropos from collective Maksym Nakonechnyi, Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovy.
”The film posits and then illustrates how war creates an altered state of existence, changing how we relate to ourselves and each other,” the jury noted. ”Created by a collective of four directors – Maksym Nakonechnyi, Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi – Miltantropos invites us to think about the role of the director in a new way and witness the beauty of work created in a spirit of collaboration forged amidst conflict.”
The DocLab Forum prize went to Australian mixed reality project Turbulence by Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts, which also received a €1,500 cash prize. Jury members Ana Brzezińska and Judith Okonkwo, said they had awarded Turbulence: “For proposing a critical and compassionate conversation about technology through the lens of disability, and for offering us a generous insight into a personal experience that reminds us that there is a multitude of realities in every human being we encounter.”
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