With her highly acclaimed Armenian animated film Aurora's Sunrise, Inna Sahakyan was able to secure the top Jury Award for best documentary at the MiradasDoc Festival. The Armenian, German, and Lithuanian co-production, directed by Sahakyan, is based on the true story of Aurora, a survivor of the 1915 Armenian Genocide who lost her family, escaped enslavement, and subsequently had to deal with Hollywood's ruthless publicity after she becomes the face of a massive humanitarian campaign. Meanwhile, a corrupt political conspiracy tries to silence her.
The festival's jury, which was made up of Hicham Falah, Jane Mote, and Ricardo Acosta, announced Aurora's Sunrise as the winner of the Best International Feature Award and described it as:
"a convincing story elegantly told, through archives, animation, and fiction, about a little-known genocide that sheds light and awareness on today's political tensions and challenges."
In 2022, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival hosted the premiere release of Aurora's Sunrise. The film, which is Armenia's submission to the Oscars, has received a critical rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and was described by critics as an essential tool to give visibility to the Armenian Genocide.
Films From Underrepresented Communities Take Over MiradasDoc 2023
The 16th edition of the film festival, which takes place in Guía de Isora in the Canary Islands of Spain, featured films and documentaries from around the globe, with various awards acquired by stories of underrepresented communities in cinema, including films from countries like Armenia, Morocco, and Cuba.
The Best First Feature award went to Fragments from Heaven, a Moroccan documentary by Adnane Baraka. The documentary portrays a nomad and a scientist traveling the Moroccan desert searching for meteorites. The jury members Alejandro Salgado, Mariana Barassi, and Yvette de Los Santos praised the film's "courage to take on a project that speaks of the past, present, and future in a spiritual timelessness in which religion and science are part of a whole."
Nacho A. Villar and Luis Rojo's La Mala Familia won the prize for Best Spanish Film. The documentary follows a group of friends' reunion after one gets released from jail. According to the jury, the documentary created "a collective portrait of current masculine fragility, showing a defiant youth through different narratives in an unprejudiced and dynamic way."
Another Spanish documentary, Inshallah by Paula Bilbao, depicts the journey of migrants who left Africa and were held for months at the Las Races refugee camp in Tenerife, the Canary Islands. The documentary won the Audience Award.
This year, the MiradasDoc Market hosted its first in-person edition after being an online-only event for the past two years.
The director of MiradasDoc Market, Valentin Romero, commented on that saying:
"We are very satisfied with this year's in-person edition because in the end we had a large number of decision makers attending. We held more than 300 industry meetings in two days, with media that had not been with us until now, such as BBC Storyville and The New York Times with Op-Docs. They were keen to find projects that tap the special connection we have here in the Canary Islands with Africa and with Latin America."
Find the winners list of the 2023 MiradasDoc film festival below.
Best International Feature Award
Aurora's Sunrise by Inna Sahakyan
Best International Feature, Special Mention
Where Do You Go With Your Dreams? By Kasper Kiertzner
Best First Feature
Fragments from Heaven by Adnane Baraka
Best Short Film
Camino de Lava by Gretel Marin
Best Spanish Film
La mala familia by Nacho A. Villar and Luis Rojo
Best Spanish Film, Special Mention
Hafreiat by Alex Sardà
Audience Award
Inshallah by Paula Bilbao