22/03/2024 - The Ukrainian project has scooped the Eurimages New Lab Outreach Award; other winners include Michelle and Uri Kranot’s Garden Alchemy, and Rachel Leah Jones’s Podium

The teams behind Timestamp and Garden Alchemy with their awards (© Kathrine Thude)

The winners of the industry awards at this year’s CPH:FORUM and CPH:LAB were announced yesterday evening at CPH:DOX’s festival centre, Kunsthal Charlottenborg. A total of seven prizes were given out, with Ukrainian director Kateryna Gornostai’s Timestamp winning the €30,000 Eurimages New Lab Outreach Award, aimed at promoting public awareness of innovative and experimental projects at the end of production or in post-production.

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Best known for her 2021 Berlinale Crystal Bear-winning fiction film Stop-Zemlia [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kateryna Gornostai
film profile], Gornostai continues with the theme of youth and education, as Timestamp documents the wartime school years of 2023-2024, filmed and assembled as a mosaic of the everyday lives of teachers and children in Ukraine during martial law. It is being produced by Olha Beskhmelnytsina, Natalia Libet and Viktor Shevchenko, of Kyiv-based 2Brave Productions, and co-produced by Dutch company Rinkel Film & Docs.

The Eurimages New Lab Award for Innovation, worth €20,000, went to the CPH:LAB project Garden Alchemy by Michelle and Uri Kranot. Michelle is also a producer on the project, through Tindrum Animation, along with Peter Fisher, of Khora. It is an XR, multi-user, interactive installation, described as an active and sensual space for contemplation, exploring human encounters as ecological acts “through an immersive experience of the sublime”.

Podium (You Have Three Minutes) by Rachel Leah Jones received the UniFrance Doc Award, consisting of €2,300 in post-production support for subtitling at TitraFilm and a one-year Unifrance membership, bringing the total value of the prize to €5,390. Best known for her multi-award-winning 2019 film Advocate [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Rachel Leah Jones, Lea Tsemel
film profile], Jones and producer Philippe Bellaiche, of Home Made Docs, keep on with the topic of Israeli politics with a film that focuses on Palestinian lawmakers in the Knesset.

The €3,000 Rise and Shine Award, for the project with the most international potential and no sales agent attached, went to Children of Honey, directed by Tanzania’s Jigar Ganatra and produced by Natalie Humphries, of the UK’s Storyboard Studios. It follows three young members of the Hadza hunter-gatherer tribe as they try to balance their indigenous upbringing with the pressures of the outside world.

The Onassis ONX Studio Award, offering ten hours of online mentorship from the ONX team over one year, was given to the Polish-UK project Hermaphrogenesis by Marcin Gawin, an immersive installation where participants engage in a reversed autopsy to rearrange the human anatomy and populate the world with androgynous organisms.

The Portuguese-Brazilian VR experience Follow the Carnation by Lui Avallos, Catarina de Sousa, Pedro Neves Marques and Rodrigo Moreira received the Sunny Side of the Doc Award, which will enable the project to be presented as a case study at the French industry event Sunny Side of the Doc. It uses archives both pre- and post-Carnation Revolution, which saw the overthrowing of the longest dictatorship in Europe in 1974, to reflect on the fragility of modern democracy.

Finally, the Newimages - Forum Des Images Award, which enables the winner to partake in the 2024 XR Development Market, was handed to the US-Romanian project The Bald Altuus by Kat Mustatea and Peter Burr. This installation is an auto-fiction portrait of a Romanian immigrant family settling in the United States in the 1980s, presented as a never-ending video game.

The full list of CPH:DOX Industry award winners is below:

Eurimages New Lab Outreach Award
Timestamp – Kateryna Gornostai (Ukraine/Netherlands)
Producers: Olha Beskhmelnytsina, Natalia Libet, Viktor Shevchenko (2Brave Productions, Rinkel Film & Docs)

Eurimages New Lab Award for Innovation
Garden Alchemy - Michelle Kranot, Uri Kranot (Denmark)
Producers: Michelle Kranot, Peter Fisher (Tindrum Animation, Khora)

UniFrance Doc Award
Podium (You Have Three Minutes) – Rachel Leah Jones (Israel/Canada/France/Switzerland)
Producer: Philippe Bellaiche (Home Made Docs)

Rise and Shine Award
Children of Honey – Jigar Ganatra (Tanzania/UK)
Producer: Natalie Humphries (Storyboard Studios)

Onassis ONX Studio Award
Hermaphrogenesis - Marcin Gawin (Poland/UK)

Sunny Side of the Doc Award
Follow the Carnation - Lui Avallos, Catarina de Sousa, Pedro Neves Marques, Rodrigo Moreira (Portugal/Brazil)

Newimages - Forum Des Images Award
The Bald Altuus - Kat Mustatea, Peter Burr (USA/Romania)