Thursday, 18 March 2010

British-Cambodian film wins One World festival


via CAAI News Media

Prague, March 17 (CTK) - The British-Cambodian film Enemies of the People about the Khmer Rouge terror in Cambodia won the Best Film Award at the One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival 2010 held in Prague on March 10-18, its spokesman Filip Sebek told CTK yesterday.

The awards will be presented at a ceremony in Prague's Lucerna cinema on Thursday evening.

The Enemies of the People, directed by Rob Lemkin, is based on dozens of interviews with people who directly participated in the massacres under the Khmer Rouge regime that were recorded by a Cambodian journalist for years. They include a unique testimony of a close aide to Pol Pot.

The Best Director Award will go to Pawel Lozinski fro the Polish documentary Chemo on oncological patients who undergo chemotherapy at a clinic in Warsaw.

The Rudolf Vrba Award for the best film in the Right to Know category will be bestowed on The Sun Behind the Clouds by Tibetan directors Rita Sarin and Tenzing Sonam.

They will also receive the Vaclav Havel Special Award for a film that uniquely contributes to the defence of human rights, awarded by the jury of which Havel, former Czech and Czechoslovak president, is honorary chair. Havel is to present the award in person.

The Rudolf Vrba Jury's Special Mention will go to the film Tibet in Song in which a local musicologist returns to Tibet to map its rich music traditions. The film was also awarded in the documentary film section at the Sundance film festival in the United States last year.

All That Glitters, a Czech film directed by Tomas Kudrna, will receive the Czech Radio Award for a creative use of music and sound in a documentary.

The Student Jury has decided to award director Marije Meerman for her film I Wanna Be Boss.

The winner of the Audience Award will be known only on Thursday.

So far Czech director Tomas Skrdlant's documentary The Unwelcome has received the highest ratings. It shows the fate of several people whom their families abandoned after their birth as disabled and who lived in institutional care.

After Prague, the One World festival continues in another 29 towns in the Czech Republic.

The festival attendance was record high this year. A total of 32,500 people attended the screenings from last Thursday, when the event was opened, until Tuesday night. The attendance in the regions is also high, Sebek said, adding that the total attendance might exceed 100,000 this year.

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