Indian films bag 2 awards at Amsterdam Documentary Festival
awards at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), one of the largest documentary film festivals in the world.
Anand Patwardhan’s The World Is Family won the award for best editing in international competition while The Flickering Lights directed by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan bagged the IDFA award for best cinematography.
Armenian filmmaker Shoghakat Vardanyan’s 1489 won the best film international competition and Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly won the best director award for his film Life Is Beautiful.
The awards were declared late on Thursday.
Besides international competition, the festival handed out awards under Envision Competition, a section devoted to daring cinematic approaches to documentary, short documentaries and youth documentaries among others.
The jurors said The World is Family is “a vivid evocation of 100 years of history in less than 100 minutes of cinema”. The film focuses on Patwardhan’s family and their connection to leaders of the Indian independence movement.
Flickering Lights portrays life in Tora, a remote village near India-Myanmar border in Manipur without electricity, mobile network, hospitals, or even a functional school, 70 years after independence.
Then the news comes that electricity may come to the village. The film shows villagers’ hopes and frustrations and lives in darkness intercepted by a few solar lamps here and there over about three years till electricity finally comes.
