Award Recipients: Jury Comments
About PrizesPrizes for the International Competition
- Jurors: Richard Copans (Chair), Edwin, Azza El-Hassan, Ishii Gakuryu, Cristina Piccino
General Comment
Making a festival is a complex work that takes a long time and needs a lot of attention, especially if the cinema that’s at the center of its research , documentary, is both a reflection and a statement about today’s world.
How can we tell stories, lives, places, and conflicts of an increasingly complex and elusive present, and still invent forms that can capture its nuances? With a gaze capable of going beyond the surface, along those edges where the less obvious details remain, seeking a narrative that escapes the rules but still respects its protagonists.
As jurors, we had a great responsibility, and for this we would like to thank the festival for the trust it has placed in us by inviting us to be part of this wonderful edition. We have tried to accept the challenge of this journey that has taken us through very different proposals and visions. Not only in terms of places, experiences, life stories, but also in terms of cinematic ways , of films narrations that define each director’s approach.
The selection we were faced with chose to present different ways of making documentaries, opening up many paths through which the large audience was able to explore all these imaginaries. We discovered poetic and politicals universes where the most intimate things become collective history. We discovered memories, living archives, traces in the landscape. Hidden in these forms we discovered the intimate but complex vision of each director, and their inner desire to make cinema.
This richness made our task more difficult and more exciting, and our discussions were long and passionate. But we are happy to have been confronted with these very different visions.
It has been an exciting week, and for this we would like to thank once again all of you who have accompanied us with great care in our work.
Thank you!
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• The Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize (The Grand Prize)
DIRECT ACTION - GERMANY, FRANCE, KOREA / 2024 / 212 min
Directors: Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell
An action film, an active film far from ideological declarations, DIRECT ACTION tells the story of a fight when the fight is done: a strong director’s statement, made possible because of the directors’ long involvement in the fight against the ND des Landes airport. The directors could approach the limits of utopia, through the simplicity of the actions they filmed: cutting wood, cleaning a chainsaw, a children’s birthday party, tearing a wall down.
Their film grammar demonstrates a real mastership: long sequence-shots, that, one after another, gives the spectator the possibility of sharing a moment of utopia. Mastering during 3 hours such a narration is no easy task.
It means the presence of the film crew is felt as a friendly gesture, not a burden.
It means a very strong choice of each camera positioning, allowing actions to develop.
It means the duration of each shot is not a formalist statement, but an inner necessity of the narration.
This allows the film to catch a particular turning point. The ND des Landes fight is over but a new fight erupts against the super bassines of Sainte Soline.
This is what the film is about: utopia is a permanent fight. It is a way of living a life in action.
• The Mayor’s Prize
With Hasan in Gaza- PALESTINE, GERMANY, FRANCE, QATAR / 2025 / 106 min
Director: Kamal Aljafari
Three miniDV tapes that the director had forgotten about, which today become the living memory of Gaza, now razed to the ground, its narrative, its existence in the face of the systematic erasure of genocide.
Starting from here, the film composes a new chapter in the author's research, which continues to focus on people and spaces destroyed by the Israeli occupation, restoring a historical geography of Palestine, in which personal experiences become collective. This is an archive of struggle and resistance, of emotions and lives on the margins, often obscured.
These images are now more necessary than ever and show us how their subject matter is also resistant, how they can be strong and break the single dominant narrative, opening up sudden unexpected movements of erased lives and stories. A memory that becomes a space for existence in time and History.
• Denroku Award (Award of Excellence)
Park- TAIWAN / 2024 / 101 min
Director: So Yo-Hen
In Taman-Taman (Park), the filmmakers craft a work of playful imagination that expands the language of filmmaking. Through a delicate balance of humor and empathy, the film reimagines public spaces as an open playground of human connection. Each frame holds the warmth of shared stories, where humans, trees, and benches exchange hopes, and gestures of care. So Yo-hen reminds us that cinema begins with the simple act of sharing, of looking, and of listening. Taman-Taman (Park) celebrates the beauty of collective memory and reaffirms that the spirit of storytelling, when open to others, will always remain deeply cinematic.
• Flex International Award (Award of Excellence)
Malqueridas- CHILE, GERMANY / 2023 / 74 min
Director: Tana Gilbert
Malqueridas is a film that is unique at various levels. The filmmaker skillfully weaves stories of motherhood, love and the betrayal. She manages to hold the viewer’s hand in order to open their eyes to the pain and suffering of a group of the society that is constantly dismissed and forgotten. By humanizing the experiences of women prison inmates, the film allows the spectator to relate and sympathize with women prison inmates who are constantly betrayed by the system and by their own families. As cameras were not allowed in prison the film was shot in secret and on mobile phones; yet, that did not compromise its image; on the contrary, Malqueridas is a film that is so well done technically that you are invited to watch parallel to the film narrative, a series of beautifully compiled images.
• Special Jury Prize
Letters to My Dead Parents- CHILE / 2025 / 106 min
Director: Ignacio Agüero
The title sounds dramatic but the film is a sweet rambling through memories, a collage using one location. Almost all of the film is filmed in a house, looking at the garden, the clouds, butterflies, flowers and cats . It is a lesson of how to fight the absence, the disappearance of loved ones. Reminiscing is sweet if you accept the art of free association.
This allows the director surprising associations of different types of material: a very long straightforward interview of a union leader of the factory where the director’s father worked, excerpts of previous movies, the fight between two cats. And so it goes . . .
Is it a dream?
Is it reality?
Slowly, behind the words, hidden in the clouds the characters appear: the father, the mother, Aunt Lucy. No drama, but the sweetness of memories and the art of a voice over that guides us into a long journey. Rambling without losing the spectator demonstrates a real mastership in the art of storytelling.
• Special Mention
L’Homme-Vertige: Tales of a City- FRANCE, GUADELOUPE / 2024 / 93 min
Director: Malaury Eloi Paisley
A film set on a remote island in the Caribbean that is a French overseas department (a former colony). The camera quietly and calmly portrays the present condition of the lonely souls of fragmented outcasts—seemingly typical but each unique—in an inhuman city that is shifting from an inorganic ruin to a new kind of modern one. They seem to be metaphors for the modern day human, cut off and divided from nature. A nearly naked homeless man fervently preaches neighborly love to the filmmaker who has pointed the camera upon him. Next to a rapper, exhausted from long years of despair, who has given up howling and sits spacing out by the river, a poet lingers, wandering wordlessly, quietly and unceasingly watching everything. Watching these two people, clearly together but silent, I sensed the dim light of prayer.
New Asian Currents Awards
- Jurors: Iguchi Nami, Thaiddhi
General Comment
This year, the YIDFF Asia New Currents program presents a very strong selection. We’ve noticed that many films explore themes of migration, homeland, and the longing to reconnect with one’s roots. This is a reflection of the contemporary world that we live in today.
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• Ogawa Shinsuke Prize
What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? - GERMANY / 2024 / 81 min
Director: Faraz Fesharaki
Through the filmmaker’s skillful storytelling, the daily conversations of a family become an intimate and poetic film. The charming characters and subtle humor bring warmth and light to the film’s complex themes. This year Ogawa Shinsuke Award go to What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?
• The Yamagata Shimbun and YBC Award (Award of Excellence)
When the Trees Sway, the Heart Stirs- KOREA / 2025 / 40 min
Director: Lee Jiyoon
An old residential area is scheduled for redevelopment. There is no hope that the inhabitants will be able to return once it is completed. They don’t even qualify for loans. An elderly person who has already moved steps forth from a garden that is no longer his and says, “a lot of pumpkins have grown.” “Places you’ve lived in for a long time are good.” In the midst of a situation where there seems to be no bright future, the filmmaker films these vistas that will soon be gone, and decides she wants to try to speak to these people who will no longer gather here. Although filming it might not change anything, it feels like a kind farewell.
• Tohoku Denka Kogyo Award (Award of Excellence)
The Tales of the Tale- TAIWAN / 2024 / 30 min
Directors: Song Cheng-ying, Hu Chin-ya
We may have witnessed a new genre: the horror documentary. Interviews with people who worked in a real coal mine. A cave-in has shuttered Taiwan’s largest coal mine, and there is a dispute over unpaid wages. The former miners do not appear on screen. Voices and vistas. Terrifying tales passed down from generation to generation in the region. Supernatural spirits. Will the souls of the miners who died in the cave-in be ever set free? Wasn’t the true horror the miners’ working conditions?
Citizens’ Prizes
- Writing Hawa
- FRANCE, THE NETHERLANDS, QATAR, AFGHANISTAN / 2024 / 85 min
Directors: Najiba Noori, Rasul (Ali) Noori