The award winners of DOK.forum 2021

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DOK.series Award sponsored by TELLUX und megaherz

UN PEDAZO DE PAZ

Jacobo Albán (director), Carlos Zerpa (director and producer), Benoît Ayraud (producer)
This year, DOK.fest München offered a new and unique award in Germany that promotes serial documentary storytelling regardless of format. DOK.series is sponsored by TELLUX-Film and megaherz and is endowed with 2,500 euros. Five projects were nominated.
UN PEDAZO DE PAZ by Jacobo Albán, Carlos Zerpa and Benoît Ayraud was awarded.

From the jury's statement: "The jury for the DOK.series Award grants its prize to UN PEDAZO DE PAZ (A PIECE OF PEACE), a short animated series chronicling sixty years of war in Colombia through intimate testimonies. The animated characters – based on an amalgam of real life survivors and supporters of the peace process between the Columbian Government and the FARC-EP guerrilla – convey the mundane horrors of their war experience in a tactile and poignant way. Their voices are spoken by individual survivors, creating a powerful and universal narrative of resilience.
The masterfully crafted animation in UN PEDAZO DE PAZ (A PIECE OF PEACE) shines a light on what is supposed to stay hidden: a gaping wound that is a country and its people."

Jury: Petra Felber (BR), Volker Neuenhoff (Amazon Studios), Richard Ladkani (Malaika Pictures), Laura-Sophie Nied (ZDF/funk), Sarah Elena Schwerzmann (ARTE G.E.I.E)

 

DOK.digital – Award for new narrative formats sponsored by Bayerische Landeszentrale für neue Medien (BLM)

SAFESPACE
Whitney Bursch, Säli El Mohands, Rosa Fabry, Saphira Siegmund, Lea Wessels, Ariane Böhm, Elena Münker, Kim Neubauer

DOK.digital – The Prize for New Narrative Formats" was awarded for the second time. The prize, endowed with 2,500 euros, is sponsored by the Bavarian Regulatory Authority for Commercial Broadcasting (BLM). It honours contemporary forms of journalistic-factual or documentary storytelling. Five exciting projects pitched their ideas to innovatively combine different media formats and platforms with content.
The award went to SAFESPACE, an infotainment format by Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb) that answers questions about health and well-being on TikTok.

 

From the jury's statement: "A young editorial team creates content around the topics of mental and physical health and well-being for an even younger and hard-to-reach audience. The platform of choice is TikTok, where this audience is at home. The SAFESPACE team communicates authentically and at eye level, feedback from the community is taken directly and translated into new content. SAFESPACE indeed offers a protected space on a platform where very young users in particular feel at home and look for like-minded people. A platform that, like many other social media channels, is not always entirely innocent of problematic body images and insecurity due to the many perfectly staged images/videos and negative comments."

BLM President Siegfried Schneider: "How important quality journalism and well-researched content are to the audience became clearer than ever during the crisis. The SAFESPACE project offers reliable information on the topic of physicality and identity, which is central to the youth target group – documentary, digital and straight to the point."

 

Bettina Katja Lange and Uwe Brunner received an honourable mention for THE SMALLEST OF WORLDS.

From the jury's statement: "THE SMALLEST OF WORLDS provides a very intimate look into private space, which has taken on a new significance due to the restrictions of the Corona pandemic. Starting from the retreats of the project artists, an environment of 300 glimpses into private spaces of people from 40 nations developed via crowdsourcing. The rooms were created with the help of photogrammetry. With this technique, it is possible to transform real spaces from images and videos into 3D models and then make them accessible with the help of virtual reality via VR glasses or in the browser."

 

Jury: Volker Bach (Head of MIZ Babelsberg and ALEX Berlin), Prof. Dr. Lena Gieseke (Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf), Matthias Leitner (Digital Storyteller & Strategiedesigner), Sabrina Scharpen (ZDF), Jutta Schirmacher (BLM)

 

Pitch Award of the Haus des Dokumentarfilms

DER SIEBTE SOHN (THE SEVENTH SON)
Max Carlo Kohal (director)

The pitch competition offers students from our partner universities the opportunity to further develop their current projects in exchange with editors, producers and distributors as part of the DOK.forum marketplace and to gain new financing partners. The prize is sponsored by the Haus des Dokumentarfilms Stuttgart and is endowed with 2,500 euros in research funding.

Awarded was Max Carlo Kohal of Zurich University of the Arts für DER SIEBTE SOHN (THE SEVENTH SON).

From the jury's statement: "For his long-term observation, Max Carlo Kohal takes us into a clearly defined universe – a cargo ship on European inland waters. From Basel to Rotterdam, always along the Rhine. Three men steer the ship and spend their lives there. With the director, we accompany the young Rudmer, who will spend the next three years training to become a sailor. The jury of the Pitch Award appreciates this insight into a world that is unknown and unseen. [...] The director shows us the complex world of industrialised goods traffic – and at the same time presents a very personal film here, shot in a very small space, a globalisation story from below."

 

Jury: Antje Boehmert (DOCDAYS Productions GmbH), Anne-Kathrin Brinkmann (ZDF/ARTE), Tobias Cassau (ZDF/ARTE), Petra Felber (BR), Sharon Nuni (ORF), Sara Günter (ZDF/funk), Jutta Krug (WDR), Catherine Le Goff (ARTE Culture Department), Esther van Messel (First Hand Films), Peter Schernhuber (Diagonale), Aline Schmid (Beauvoir Films), Marcus Vetter (SWR, Junger Dokumentarfilm), Sven Wälti (SRG SSR), Ralph Wieser (Mischief Films)

 

 

 

The award recognises projects with a large proportion of archival material and thus strengthens a documentary genre rich in tradition. The winning project receives British Pathé archive material worth 15,000 euros or alternatively 2,500 euros in cash.