“To Hold a Mountain,” a documentary about sisterhood and solitude in the Montenegrin highlands, by director duo Biljana Tutrov and Petar Gromajic, won the grand prize of the Millennium Documents Against Gravity at a ceremony in Warsaw on Thursday.
The film, which won the World Cinema Awards Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year, was praised by the jury for its “subtle portrayal of sisterhood, adolescence, and the deep and generative role that nature and family have in shaping us.” Mourtada Elfadol of Variety magazine described it as “an emotionally crushing meditation on grief and perseverance.”
“This film transports us to a magical world, a chosen solitude shared by an aunt and niece, re-illustrating for us the beauty of family ties in enchanting natural landscapes and rural traditions, full of love and patience,” said the jury. “The filmmakers themselves showed similar patience, quietly observing and capturing every subtle detail in the story of humanity’s reunion with nature.”
Twelve films competed for the Grand Prix Bank Millennium Award at the 23rd Millennium Documents Against Gravity, to be held on May 17 in Warsaw and six other Polish cities. The jury consisted of Oscar-nominated Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki (Fathers and Sons), Danish cinematographer and director Lee Grob (Olmo and the Seagull), and Ossar Award-nominated producer. Jessica Hargrave (“Come See Me in the Good Light”). The festival will continue online from May 19th to June 1st.
The special prize in the main competition was awarded to the IDFA-winning documentary A Fox Under a Pink Moon by directors Meldad Oskouej and Soraya Akragi, which also won two other awards on Thursday night, including the Amnesty International Poland Award and the FIPRESCI Award, the first Millennium Document to be awarded by the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI).
Other awards in the main competition included Polish filmmaker and cinematographer Michał Marczak’s Closure, which won Best Cinematography. The award for Best Editing went to Oscar-nominated director Sara Dosa (The Fire) for “Time and Water.”
The festival’s Best Polish Film award went to Maciej Ciuszke’s Candidate for Death, a 10-year story about a father, his son, and two young friends who make amateur horror films. Special recognition went to Alisa Kovalenko and Malysia Nikitiuk’s Trace, a powerful portrayal of a Ukrainian woman who refuses to remain silent after surviving sexual assault during the war with Russia. The film also won the Smakjam Award for Best Film in the Polish competition.
Millennium Docs was held simultaneously in seven cities in Poland, and several awards were also presented at satellite locations of the festival. CPH:DOX’s opening documentary “Mariinka”, directed by Belgian filmmaker Pieter Jan de Pew, depicting the lives of young people shattered by the war in Ukraine, has won the Gdynia Mayor’s Award and the Poznań City Freedom Award. The ART.DOC award, presented in Bydgoszcz, went to Greek director Lukas Paleokrasas’s “Bugboy,” a delicate depiction of youth.
“Fiume o Morte!” won the first ever FIPRESCI Documentary Grand Prix.
Provided by IFFR
Commenting on this year’s edition, festival director Arthur Liebhard said: “Once again we have had the pleasure of celebrating the documentary film genre in all its forms.”
“This year, we significantly expanded our activities for the industry, providing new opportunities to develop film projects within and with the festival. We witnessed over 200 filmmakers and other industry professionals fill the screening room,” said Leibhart. “We have elevated the status of documentary film in the socio-cultural consciousness to a level unheard of in most other countries.”
Earlier this week, at the festival’s opening ceremony, FIPRESCI announced the Documentary Grand Prix, which will be awarded to the best documentary film of the year, as voted on by members of its critics group. The award went to Croatian director Igor Bejnović’s “Fiume o Morte!” His Rotterdam Prize-winning documentary wittily combines archival footage and historical reenactments to reimagine the 1919 occupation of the disputed city of Fiume by Italian fascists.
During a Q&A after a special screening of the film in Warsaw, Bežinovic, who is originally from modern-day Fiume, now called Rijeka, explained “Fiume o Morte!” As a cinematic “reuse of history.” Featuring a cast of non-professional locals, the film playfully interrogates this cruel but failed profession, while also allowing its cast, many of whom are descendants of fascist victims, to reinterpret and reclaim a chapter in the city’s past. According to Bejinovic, this was their way of “taking revenge through storytelling and art.”
The power and potential of documentary filmmaking was a theme throughout the week. At the opening ceremony, the festival’s artistic director Karol Pikarczyk subtly criticized German director Wim Wenders and the various controversies that have swirled around this year’s Berlin Film Festival, where jury president Wenders argued that filmmakers should be “apolitical.”
“I’m not going to take issue with the person who said it, but I’m going to take issue with the emotion,” Piekarczyk said. “I don’t know when fundamental human rights became political. We didn’t make fundamental human rights political. I think there is a deep misunderstanding of the way filmmakers, especially documentary filmmakers, work.”
“Traces” won the Panorama Audience Award in Berlin.
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Director Piekarczyk mentioned the work of Ukrainian film director Kovalenko, who won the Panorama Audience Award at this year’s Berlinale. The director’s “Trace” is based on her experiences as a survivor of sexual violence and follows six Ukrainian women as they attempt to transform their trauma into collective agency and hope.
“Alissa didn’t make the movie because she had this list, she just thought about how to make the movie,” Pekarchikside said. “She created this piece because it’s a personal story, but it’s a story that people want to hear. It’s a story about how sexual violence can be weaponized.”
It was Kovalenko who provided one of the most moving moments of the week during a panel discussion about documentary film as an act of resilience. The director spoke about his experiences as a prisoner of war in the Russian military, which systematically subjected Ukrainian women to sexual violence and other forms of torture.
It took two years for Kovalenko to speak publicly about his captivity and torture. But eventually she came to believe that she had “no choice” but to use her position as a documentary filmmaker to share the stories of other survivors.
“From our community’s first meetings, we often talked about documentary films to fight for justice, amplify the voices of survivors, and document war crimes as an advocacy tool,” she said.
“Culture has become a battlefield. Cinema has become our weapon against invaders,” she continued. “After[Russia’s full-scale]invasion, you can’t think of cinema as art. It’s a matter of responsibility as artists. We are all in the resistance to make the world a better place.”
