Who will grab the prizes this year?

21. 02. 2020

This year’s festival program is divided into a total of 14 categories, out of which there are three competition categories – International Competition, Czech Competition and Right to Know. Who will grab the prize from Prague?

International Competition

The International Competition presents foreign documentaries made with an original approach that will be vying for Best Film and Best Director. Being shown in world premiere is Agnieszka Zwiefka’s Scars about the controversial life path of a former female fighter for the Tamil Tigers. The festival is also hosting the international premiere of Ninosca, a portrait of a woman from Nicaragua, whom director Peter Torbiörnsson (Best Director award at One World in 2002) followed for 40 years, from her early childhood in a village all the way to her emigration to Spain for work so that she could feed her family. These films will be competing with three documentaries that won awards at the Sundance film festival. The Painter and the Thief looks at the strange relationship between two seemingly very different people: Czech artist Barbora Kysilková and one of the thieves who stole two of her paintings from a Norwegian gallery in 2015. In Acasa, My Home, director Radu Ciorniciuc explores the life of a family living in the Bucharest Delta on the city’s outskirts who are forced by gentrification to move to the city. Family is also the central theme of Iryna Tsilyk’s The Earth Is Blue As an Orange, a portrait of single mother Anna and her four children living in a warzone in Ukraine.

Ukrainian director Iryna Tsilyk records the family’s activities while the oldest daughter, Miroslava, together with her mother and siblings, are making a film about their wartime experiences.

Right to Know

In the Right to Know category, the Václav Havel Jury will be judging films that contribute, in a unique manner, to protecting human rights or that present powerful stories of people engaged in fighting for human rights. One of this year’s contenders is Advocate, which shows Israeli attorney Lea Tsemel’s endless struggle for legal justice. Tsemel, who has spent her entire career fighting for the rights of Palestinians, will be on hand in person. Former Vietnamese pop star (and today dissident) Mai Khoi, who sat on the Václav Havel Jury in 2017, will present her documentary Mai Khoi & The Dissidents, which follows her transformation from prominent singer into an enemy of the communist regime who calls attention to the lack of freedom in her country. The crew of the Sea-Watch 3, headed by Captain Carola Rackete, has saved more than three dozen refugees from drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. The film Sea-Watch 3 shows how. 

The Advocate shows the life of the Israeli lawyer in a comprehensive character study, using refreshing elements of style.

Czech Competition

A total of eleven films, including five world premieres, will be vying for the title of best documentary in the Czech Competition. In The Czechs Are Excellent Mushroom Pickers, Apolena Rychlíková looks at climate change in the Czech Republic from the viewpoint of an extraterrestrial probe. Director Andrea Culková explores the emotions evoked by climate change in women in her documentary Grief. Linda Kallistová Jablonská’s Doggy Love, meanwhile, offers a portrait of the musher Jana, who sets out with her team for the longest sled dog race in Europe, the Finnmarksløpet. The capital of Mongolia is currently home to one and a half million people – half the entire country’s population. When fifty-year-old Tumurbaator arrives in the city, will his dream of a better life come true? Find out in Anji Sauvé Clubb’s Nomad Meets the City. And director Dmitry Bogolyubov looks at how Putin’s followers use the legacy of the Great Patriotic War to gain support from the Russian people in Town of Glory.