Dir: Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Year: 2008
Dur:Documentary, 83 Minutes
Australia

Sponsored by the Australian High Commission

“It’s double jeopardy when you’re black and you’re homosexual mate – and you’re a bloody thief and a thespian too...” – Jack Charles

Bastardy is a delicately drawn, revealing portrait of a man with many faces. Aborigine actor Jack Charles is one of Australia’s most highly regarded actors - a pioneer of the country’s first Black Theatre Company, who ultimately helped shape the cultural landscape of Australia. He is also homeless and addicted to heroin, basking in the streets of Melbourne and stealing what he can out of suburban estates for his next fix. Throughout his 40 year career, he has slipped in-between two worlds, highly venerated and recognized in one and in the other marginalized and invisible. Over 7 years, director Amiel Courtin-Wilson follows Jack Charles, a sometimes tragic, sometimes hopeful shape shifter, as he negotiates the moral complexities of his past and his presence in contemporary Australia with laconic candor and effervescent humour.
Courtesy of www.bastardydocumentary.com

Prix Special Du Jury 2010 - FIFO (Pacific International Doc Film Fest)
Best Feature Documentary 2009 - Film Critics Circle of Australia (FCCA)
Best Documentary Social & Political Issues Winner Best Documentary –
Human Story Melbourne International Film Festival
Top 5 Audience Award 2009 - Documentary Sydney Film Festival
Official Selection – Sidney Film Festival, Melbourne International,
Sheffield International Festival, Singapore International Festival

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“It immerses you in its reality one toe at a time, until suddenly you are in over your head, gasping for air as the horror of the situation reveals itself in all its savage devastation.” – The LA Times

Some time in the 1960s a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world. Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo… Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars waged at the center of the continent. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.
Courtesy of www.darwinsnightmare.com

Nominated for Best Feature Documentary 2006 – The Academy Awards
European Jury Award for Best Feature Film 2005 - Angers Europeans First Film Festival
Cesar Award for Best First Film 2006 – Cesar Awards, France
Best Documentary Feature 2004 – European Film Awards
Audience Award 2004 – Entrevues Film Festival; Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival
FIPRESCI Prize 2005 - Sydney Film Festival
Label Europa Cinema Award 2004 – Venice Film Festival
Vienna Film Award 2004 - Viennale

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• The Island President
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“20 Million dollars blown in 666 days! What the F%#* Happened?!!!”

With cynical wit, biting sarcasm and an in-your-face investigative style, the film follows the young executives of Finnish mobile Entertainment company, RIOT-E, in their two-year attempt to become insanely rich. RIOT-E attracted millions of dollars in investment from worldwide corporate giants such as Nokia, News Corporation and the Bin Laden backed Carlyle. But success inevitably led to excess. Soon RIOT-E was attracting infamy within the media for its wild parties, indulgent group sex sessions, naked restaurant wrestling and for its defiant executives running naked through the night streets of Helsinki. The drugs were plenty, the sex on tap and debauchery in abundance. Riot On! is an entertaining, bold account of vaulting ambition mired by multi-million dollar mistakes, personal tragedies and outlandish indulgence... And of how blown minds led to blown deals.

Special Jury Commendation 2005 - Raindance Film Festival, London
Runner Up for Best Documentary 2006 - Boston Underground Film Festival, USA
Grand Festival Award 2006 - Berkeley Video & Film Festival, California, USA
In Competition 2005 / 6 - Nordische Filmtage Lübeck, Germany; Tempo Documentary Festival, Sweden; Black Nights Film Festival, Tallinn, Estonia; Filmtältet / Malmöfestivalen, Sweden



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Dir: Paul Taylor
Year: 2007
Dur: Documentary, 83 Minutes
UK / South Africa

“We can’t all speak at once. But we can all sing at once…” – Zwai Bala, We Are Together

Life has not been easy for 12-year-old S’lindile, her siblings and her friends at the Agape Orphanage in South Africa, where most of the children have lost their parents to AIDS. But they are still kids and teenagers, bashful around boys, squabbling with each other. And when they lift their voices in song, something extraordinary happens. Filmed over three years and spanning two continents, We Are Together is the story of an orphanage, unlike one you’ve ever seen before. With unforgettable kids, soaring music and a plot full of surprises, the film arrives as a stirring and uplifting theatrical documentary.

TriContinental Film Festival – Audience Award, Best Documentary
Tribeca Film Festival, New York - Audience Award
Tribeca Film Festival, New York - Special Jury Prize
Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival - Audience Award
Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival - First Appearance Award
Amnesty International Film Festival - Audience Award
Amnesty International Film Festival - Special Jury prize
One World International Film Festival - Special Jury Prize.

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• 3 Rooms of Melancholia
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“The story of the Cold War told through the prism of its least known arena: Africa.” www.peopleofcolororganize

For more than twenty years, during a time when most African countries were still under the yoke of colonialism, Cuban revolutionaries were actively involved in liberation wars across Africa. Director, Jihan El-Tahri chronicles the crucial role that Cuba played in securing the independence of nations throughout Africa. The film focuses on Cuban efforts in Congo, Guinea-Bissau and during the war in Angola. It reveals incredible events that span thirty years, from Che Guevara’s covert mission to avenge the death of Patrice Lumumba, to Fidel Castro’s command of the decisive battle in Angola and the negotiations with Apartheid South Africa that finally ended the war. Cuba, An African Odyssey, is a rigorous, insightful exploration of these unusual and seldom-discussed transnational Afro-Cuban relationships and a thoughtful reflection on the myriad of ways in which they laid the blueprint for an escape from the shadow of colonialism.

Official Selection - Banff International Television Festival [2007]; FESPACO [2007], Vues d’Afrique de Montréal, Sunny Side of the Docs, Marseille 2006, San Francisco Input Film Festival (USA) and Chicago International Documentary Festival (USA),
Award of the Documentary Jury - Festival International du Film d'Afrique et des Iles (FIFAI) at the Reunion (France)
Best Director - Pan Africa International [2007]
Best Film Directed by a Woman of Color - African Diaspora Film Festival [2007]
Best Documentary - Pan African Film Festival [2009]

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"… the film is stunning in its invention, its beauty, and its muffled sadness... A unique work of art." – Premiere (France)

Set against the devastating second Chechen War, 3 Rooms of Melancholia is a visceral but poetic film that documents the impact of this on-going conflict on the children on Russia and Chechnya. The story unfolds in three, deeply provocative chapters: The first shows Russian children on Kronstadt, an island that lies before St. Petersburg, where President Putin has established by decree a military school for orphaned children. They are being trained in the Kronstadt cadet academy as child soldiers for the fatherland. The imagined enemy is the Chechen. The second depicts life and death in Grozny, the Chechnyan Capital ruined by the years of conflict. The final chapter, set in Chechnya and Ingushetia, moves the story into the family of Xhadizhat Gataeva, who has vowed to act as mother for 63 Chechnyan orphans. She has brought them together from the ruins of a devastated Grozny. Almost all of their parents were killed by the Russians.

Best Documentary Film – Golden Apricot International Film Festival
DOEN Award for Director, Pirjo Honkasalo – Amnesty International
Human Rights Film Network Award
Special Mention - EIUC Award
Official Selection - International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (2004), Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (2005), Prix Italia (2005), Tampere Film Festival (2005), Venice Film Festival (2004), Yerevan International Film Festival (2005)


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• We Are Together
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"...undoubtedly one of the finest pieces of journalism within living memory" – www.variety.com

The Revolution will not be Televised is a documentary about the April 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt which briefly deposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. A television crew from Ireland’s Radio Telifís Éireann happened to be recording a documentary about Chávez during the events of April 11, 2002. Shifting focus, they followed the events as they occurred, creating a thrilling insight into the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and charting the last seven months in the run up to the coup d’état against him and his dramatic return to power some 48 hours later. Never has such a range of footage of Chavez, the new icon of the left and the thorn in the side of the US Administration, been assembled in one documentary.

Grand Prize - Sunday Independent Global Television
Best Feature Documentary - Galway Film Fleadh
1st Prize – Tri Continental Film Festival South Africa
Best Program in the Information and Current Affairs Category, Jury Award - BANFF Festival 2003
2003 Needle Award - Malaga International Film Festival Spain
Le Prix George du Beau Regard International ­- FID Marseilles Film Festival, France
Official Selection - Seattle Film Festival, USA


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“Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 2000 – for one night an entire national came to a standstill…”

Sometime during the afternoon of June 12, Sandro di Nascimento, a disenfranchised young man who had survived a harsh and brutal childhood in the favelas of Rio boarded a bus on route 174 and took its passengers hostage. For more than 4 hours, a tense stand-off played out between the police and what was thought to be merely a drugged up street kid. In the devastating aftermath, filmmaker Jose Padilha meticulously wove together Sandr’s story from hours of live Television footage and testimony from the hijack survivors, police rescue teams, acquaintances and members of Sandro’s family. This award winning documentary brought Sandro’s story from the streets of Rio to the eyes of the world.

Best Documentary – Sao Paulo Film Festival, Havana Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, Miami International Film Festival
Amnesty International Award – Rotterdam Film Festival
One Future Award – Munich Film Festival


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“Perhaps the value of THE MOTHERS’ HOUSE lies for me most effectively in its being a record of how the most charming, pure-minded life can go wrong if nothing is done to help – in both large and small ways…” – Francois Verster, filmmaker

Described as astonishingly intimate, emotionally overwhelming and sometimes shocking, The Mothers’ House is a record of four years in the life of Miché, a charming, precocious yet troubled teenage girl growing into womanhood in post-Apartheid South Africa. Living with her mother and grandmother in Bonteheuwel, a “coloured” township outside Cape Town, she has to face not only life in a community troubled by gangsterism and drug abuse, but also what it means to break the unbearable cycle of emotional and physical violence imprisoning her own family. The Mothers’ House gives the viewer a powerful insight into three generations of women striving to untie the knots that bind and to find peace and love amongst all the hurt and anger within their community and themselves.
Courtesy of www.themothershouse.co.za

Best Documentary – Durban International Film Festival 2007
Best Documenrary – SAFTA 2006
Best Film, International Competition; Documania Award – Docusur 2006
Best Documentary – Apollo Film Festival, Victoria West 2006
Best Documentary – Zimbabwe International Film Festival 2006
Premio Diocesi di Milano – Milan Africa, Asia and Latim America Festival 2006
Best Documentary – Cape Town World Cinema Festival 2005

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Dir: Rehad Desai
Year: 2004
Dur: Documentary, 74 Minutes
South Africa

“A trail from London to Johannesburg, the inner conflict of a father and son and a country in turmoil.” - Born into Struggle

In his documentary BORN INTO STRUGGLE, filmmaker Rehad Desai interweaves many storylines into a personal investigation of his performance as a father. Desai is the son of the well-known South African political activist Barney Desai (1932-1997). Due to the latter's activities, the family was forced to flee to England in the seventies and live in political exile. In 1990, they returned to South Africa, where father Desai assisted in the conclusion of the Apartheid regime. Politically, Barney Desai was a hero, but as a father he was conspicuously absent, with all due consequences. The scars caused by their life in exile are still fresh, as is clear from the interviews with family members. What is more, Desai the filmmaker realises that he, in turn, imitates his father's behaviour with his own son, who in the meantime has become a lanky teenager. At this point, the filmmaker appears in the film, sitting on a chair during an interview or together with his son on a subway train. By that time, he has already incorporated interviews, with Nelson Mandela and others, abundant archival footage, as well as recent shots to depict the tumultuous political history of both his country and family. Courtesy of IDFA

Audience Award – Encounters International Documentary Festival 2004
Best Film – Apollo Film Festival 2004
Best Film – Cape Town World Cinema Festival 2004

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• Bastardy
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