Press release * Thursday 15 December 2022
Under the presidency of Mr. Nabil Bouhajra, Regional Director TV5MONDE Maghreb-Orient, the URTI Jury composed of 6 member countries - Belgium, Cameroon, Kosovo, Morocco, Portugal and Romania - selected the winners of the 41st International URTI Grand Prix for Author’s Documentary.
URTI GRAND PRIX: My Childhood, my country - 20 years in Afghanistan
Directors: Phil Grabsky & Shoaib Sharifi - 52 min
Germany, United Kingdom, Afghanistan
Westdeutscher Rundfunk / ARTE / Seventh Art Productions
Award-winning filmmakers, Phil Grabsky and Shoaib Sharifi, present a real-life epic of boyhood and manhood, filmed across twenty years in one of the most embattled corners of the globe. My Childhood, My Country - 20 Years in Afghanistan follows the journey of Afghan youth, Mir Hussain, growing up in a land ravaged by war.
Silver Medal: Suspended Wifes
Director: Merieme Addou - 73 min
Morocco, France, Qatar - TV 2M / Iris Prod, Haut les mains
Suspended wives are women left behind by their husbands. While men in Morocco are allowed to marry again six months after they have been separated, for women to get divorced is an almost insurmountable bureaucratic undertaking. They are not married neither divorced. Ghita, Latifa and Saadia are seeking their freedom through an unfortunate long divorce process.
Bronze Medal: Sung-yeo
Director: InGun Lee - 59 min
South Korea - KBS
Sung-yeo is a documentary about Yoon Sung-yeo’s journey to clear his name as a murderer. He spent thirty-one years of his life behind the bars for the 8th casualty of the series of murders in Hwaseong, Korea. Until the retrial that recovers his honor, he was a murderer and no one dared to listen to his side of story. It is a human tragedy and malpractice of justice.
Martine Filippi Prize for Discovery (ex aequo): It's time to Rise up - I am a Rickshaw Puller
Director: KM Taj-Biul Hasan - 49 min
Bangladesh - Dhrupad Communication
This is the story of Rahela Begum, a 23 years old single unfortunate mother becoming a female rickshaw-puller, who breaking traditional gender roles while supporting her two children when her husband left her. Muslim-majority Bangladesh is one of Asia’s most conservative societies where the concept of a woman doing such a job had been unheard of before Rahela hit the road three years ago in the capital city Dhaka.
Martine Filippi Prize for Discovery (ex aequo): Erasmus in Gaza
Directors: Chiara Avesani & Matteo Delbò - 88 min
Spain - APIMED / Arpa films (Spain), Effe Real Cinema (Italy), Al Jazeera (Qatar), Java Films (France)
Riccardo, an Italian final-year medical student, is going on Erasmus. The destination: Gaza, a war zone. He wants to become a war surgeon and is writing his thesis on explosive bullet wounds. Upon arrival, the pressure mounts: his experience will determine the success of the exchange programme. The imminence of war doesn’t help and he starts suffering panic attacks. And when war is rekindled, Riccardo has to make many difficult choices.
Digital Works Award: Making Pandemics
Director: Marie-Monique Robin - 107 min
France - Ushuaia TV / M2R Films, France-TV Outre-mer, RTS, RTBF
Dengue, Chikungunya, Covid-19, AIDS, Ebola: the number of emerging diseases - previously unknown - has exploded in the last 40 years. Most of them are zoonoses, infectious diseases transmitted to humans by animals. In this documentary, actress Juliette Binoche seeks to understand the causes of this "epidemic of pandemics". She meets with scientists from around the world to understand the links between human health and the health of ecosystems.
