The DOXA award winners are selected on the basis of three major criteria: success and innovation in the realization of the project's concept; originality and relevance of subject matter and approach; and overall artistic and technical proficiency.

 

DOXA Feature Documentary Award

Jury Statement:

The jury would like all those whose feature documentaries we considered this year to know that we had a difficult time making a decision. The ideas were powerful, and the filmmaking was of a high quality. At a time when there seems to be anxiety about the exhaustion of the non-fiction form, we discovered in a number of these films what we love most about documentary cinema: curiosity, intelligence, depth of feeling, acuteness of perception, an open mind and a poetic sensibility.

One film seemed to us to embody all these qualities and more. It is a film from the heart, a film with a potentially fragile trajectory. It’s a film that takes risks, and it was made with the independent spirit that DOXA was created to celebrate. We admired this film for its poetic imagery, its honesty, its rigorous intelligence and its modesty. We admired it for the beauty of its images and the way it managed to articulate the particular and the universal simultaneously. It’s a film that is not afraid of, nor does it pathologize, the burdens and sorrows of being human. It’s honest and moving in its grief and rises in the end to expressions of joy. It’s a film that seeks out gentle words and ceremonies to articulate the experience of all women, and indirectly, of their sons as well. And, as in many memorable documentaries, the relationship between the filmmaker and, in this case, her subject, develops into a mutual exchange, a complex and intimate sharing of the experience and of the moment. It’s an honour to present the DOXA Feature Documentary Award for 2012 to Dutch filmmaker Aliona Van Der Horst for Water Children—a portrait of multidisciplinary artist Tomoko Mukaiyama, the installation of 12,000 white dresses in a rural Japanese town, the biological cycles of life and death, and a mature and forgiving meditation on the great unanswerable questions.

A second film also moved us deeply, and was also a portrait, in this case of three brothers and a sister who travel from Israel to Austria to encounter the concentration camp sites where their father was incarcerated and nearly worked to death during the Second World War. One of the brothers is the filmmaker, and it may be fair to say that there has never been a portrait of a family like this on film. Their candour, their ferocity, their stubbornness, their bickering, their wit and their great love for one another are infuriating and inspiring. The revelations in the quiet suburban community of Gusen, Austria, are shocking and disturbing, and the meeting of two retired servicemen who helped to liberate the site where the father was held is only one of several astonishing moments in a film that sheds new light and emotion on a subject we thought we knew well. Through it all, these four amazing siblings question received wisdom and ask challenging questions of one another that go to the heart of family, history—and survival. It’s our pleasure to award an Honourable Mention to Six Million and One, directed by David Fisher.

We encourage you to make every effort to see these two brave and intelligent films. You will not soon forget them.

Filmmaker response:

NFB Colin Low Award for Canadian Documentary, Co-sponsored by Willian F. White.

Prize: $1,000 cash award courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada and a $2,500 grant courtesy of the William F. White National Grants Program.

Jury Statement:

We have awarded the NFB Colin Low Award for Canadian Documentary to a disaster film of quiet beauty and global resonance.

Simone Rapisarda Casanova's poetic The Strawberry Tree, mixes ethnography with documentary with reverie, just like the program notes say. Every frame lingers on the last days of an indigenous society and a disappearing way of life. In fact, these images are all that is left of a remote Cuban fishing village, destroyed by extreme weather.

Stunningly beautiful, the film never romanticizes the situation of the subsistence farmers who live on the edge of the sea and are about to lose everything they have, but not who they are.

A playful, formal, deeply respectful film, it reminds us that the limits of documentary filmmaking are never fixed. The complicity of the entire community asks us to take notice: "Look at us. We are here.”

Honourable Mentions:
Hard Light is a film that elevates the documentary form. It is a story about an artist that unfolds in a gorgeous collision of art and life, fact and fiction. We felt it should be honoured for pushing the boundaries so beautifully.

From the beginning of our deliberations, it was clear that each of us on the jury had been moved and affected by The Boxing Girls of Kabul. Focused in a region where the stories of both men and women are so often presented one-dimensionally, we found storytelling on a human scale, about individuals for whom we came to care, facing challenges ranging from the historical, political, social, to the personal and even athletic in nature.

Filmmaker Response:

I am deeply honoured and touched by the decision of the Jury to give the NFB Colin Low Award to my film. Even if The Strawberry Tree is a film I made with much love and patience, I truly believe that its beauty is solely a reflection of the beauty of the people portrayed in it. So it's to them that I wish to dedicate this award and it's to them that I will transfer the cash part of the Award. This also in the hope that on their side, to be able to afford new nets and new fins, will be considered enough of a reward for having had to cope with me and my annoying camera for more than a month.
-Simone Rapisarda Casanova, The Strawberry Tree

 

DOXA Short Documentary Award

Jury Statement:

We, the jury, are very pleased to award the 2012 DOXA Short Documentary Award to The Photographer’s Wife by Philip Widmann and Karstan Krause. This beautiful and evocative film reconstructs a 40-year love affair through photographs, and by doing so illuminates the ephemeral nature of love and life.

We would also like to recognize the film Extase, by Carine Bijlsma with an Honorable Mention in this category. This film captures the transcendent power of music through the journey of an impassioned conductor and instills in the viewer a belief in the necessity of art in all of our lives.

Congratulations to the filmmakers.

Filmmaker Responses:

We would very much like to thank the festival team for showing our film in Vancouver and the jury for honoring our work with this award. It is a pity that we cannot be here with you tonight to celebrate together. Have a great evening! We hope to join you in Vancouver in the next years, with new films. All the best from Hamburg and Berlin, Karsten and Philip.
-Philip Widmann and Karsten Krause, The Photographer's Wife