Jeremy Hardy presented the trophies at the Sheffield Doc/Fest Awards ceremony, celebrating the best of the many documentaries that had been shown over the past five days.
The Student Award, for people who, as Hardy put it, ‘should have been out rioting,’ was awarded to Boys, directed by Marc Williamson. Jury spokesperson Kate Townsend said, “…this particular documentary stood out for two components key to a documentary – remarkable access and sensitivity of approach. Boys is an observational film which follows the struggles of two pupils over a term in a boarding school for boys with emotional and behavioural disorders. There are no interviews in the film and the director shows an impressive ability to shape his self-shot footage to pursue the narrative of the boys’ slow progress and the challenges of the staff who try to help them. What emerges is a powerful film which unpeels layers of destructive behaviour to show the vulnerable children beneath.”
Sheffield Doc/Fest’s Inspiration Award, now in its fourth year was presented to BBC Storyille Editor Nick Fraser. Producer Simon Chinn said, “I can’t think of anyone more deserving of an award for inspiration than Nick Fraser. He has inspired me more than anyone I can think of to make documentaries, to believe documentaries can be the highest form of storytelling, and to be ambitious with them. And I know, from the many filmmakers I meet – both those who are starting out and the more established ones – that he continues to support and inspire filmmakers to do their very best work. We’d all be a lot worse off without him.”??In accepting the award, Nick Fraser said: ”Docs – the great ones, I mean, but also docs in small pieces – have the ability to tell us things we don’t know. They’re also, in their own way, truthful. And they can have their own worldly beauty. Of course they must be worldly, coming from what we see, but the greatest docs are oddly innocent, too – as if they and we who watch them are seeing things for the first time”.
The Sheffield Youth Jury Award was awarded to God Loves Uganda directed by Roger Ross Williams. The Sheffield Innovation Award was awarded to Alma, a Tale of Violence, directed by Miquel Dewever-Plana and Isabelle Fougère. The Sheffield Green Award was awarded to Pandora’s Promise, directed by Robert Stone. The jury said that it had the “potential to provoke controversy and debate. If you believe fundamentally in the dangers of nuclear power it encourages you to interrogate that view. Applying techniques more commonly found in left-wing polemic to a seemingly contradictory view, Pandora’s Promise is a great piece of filmmaking. It left us with questions and a desire to explore the issues more. Choosing a pro-nuclear film as the winner of the Green Jury may seem odd but it is in shaking our preconceptions that Pandora’s Promise is so successful”.
The Sheffield Doc/Fest Audience Award will be announced on Tuesday 18 June.
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