Winners of IDFF Artdocfest / Riga 2021 International Documentary Film Festival announced / Article / LSM.lv

The winners of the awards of the International Documentary Film Festival “IDFF Artdocfest / Riga 2021” have been announced, the organizers informed.

The main prize was awarded by the jury of the Grand Prix for the movie “Silent Voice” (dir. Rika Valerik, “The Silent Voice”). It is about a new Chechen mixed martial artist wrestler, Havadja, who is forced to flee to Belgium when his brother finds out about his homosexuality and threatens to kill him. Due to the threats posed to the film’s protagonist and creators, the director’s pseudonym is mentioned in the film’s titles and press materials.

Irina Cilikas received the special award of the festival movie “Earth is blue like an orange” (“The Earth is Blue as an Orange”) about the efforts of a mother of 4 children near Donbass to create a safe place for their children, full of life and light, at a time when explosions and chaos have taken over the world around them.

Jury noting movie “Gunda” Viktor Kosakovsky was awarded the prize for his best work as a director for his work and for his understanding of the language of animals and birds.

The jury awarded its special prize for “ambitious design, risky performance and brilliant results” films “Baikonur. Intrusion ” (rež. Angels Angelovs, “Breaking into Baikonur”).

The jury of the festival evaluated 20 films. The jury consisted of Anton Dolin, a well-known Russian film critic and editor-in-chief of Iskusstvo Kino, Europe’s oldest film magazine, Dita Rietuma, film critic and director of the National Film Center, and Artemis Troickis, a journalist and television and radio program director.

Alina Rudnicka, a documentary filmmaker and creative producer of the TV documentary of Current Time TV in Prague, a film critic, Slavri, (Italy) University Associate Professor Massimo Tria in Pisa.

One of the awards named after the director Herz Frank will travel to Lithuania, but the other will remain in Latvia. Elīna Langes-Ionatamishvili received the main prize in the competition of 10 films “Baltic Focus” movie “Restless Memories” (“Restless memories”) about Inu and Nicoloz, Georgian children, whose days are spent in the 2008 Georgian-Russian war refugee village of Cerovani.

For the best director’s work “Baltic Focus” the jury presented an award to Giedre Žickitė for movie “Leap” (“The Jump”).

The jury decided to award the special prize “for a short film about a short life, for beauty and unusual artistic performance” to Lithuanian director Marija Stonīte and for the film “One Life” (“One Life”).

The festival was organized as an artistic action – cinema with home delivery. During the campaign, all the films of the festival competition program “Baltic Focus” and the film “Gunda” from the competition program “Artdocfest” were shown to groups of spectators of one bubble / one household. The films of the festival were shown to a large family on a farm, in a film studio, in the open air in a youth community, in a women’s prison. This premiere was followed by an online discussion with the audience.

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