Thanks to the partnership with the Tribeca Film Institute, the Institute of Documentary Film in cooperation with One World presents for the first time the IF/Then Short Pitch. Six documentary short projects were presented in front of the international jury composed of commissioning editor Margje De Koning (IKON), executive director Amy Hobby (Tribeca Film Institute), documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto, Lucila Moctezuma (Chicken & Egg Pictures), and senior programmer Martijn te Pas (IDFA).
The winning project is Blackandwhite, directed by Eluned Zoe Aiano and Anna Benner, produced by Linda Dedkova and Martin Hulovec. “We love this bold collaboration which will provoke delight in audiences in equal measure. This film will play with contradiction and we are looking forward to something wild, weird, abstract, and funny built around a complex character,” explains the jury.
The film uses a local urban legend of a nurse from the Second World War to deal with our perception of the female role in war time, heroism and revenge, on the background of Czech-German relations. Based on several newspaper sources and word of mouth, we recreate the story by working with a collective imagination of the interviewees, based on their idea of who the bespoken woman and her life was or could be. Their words are in dialogue with different visual materials from famous film scenes, historical archives, experimental animation and documentary footage of their daily life. Their imagination is a key to the concept so the interviewees themselves are involved in the visual material choice. Combining documentary, archive and animation, the film will construct a visualisation of this woman and her story based on the collective imagination of people living in Trebon in the present day.
The project Blackandwhite received USD 20,000 to complete the film and the IF/Then support for multi-platform distribution.
CONGRATULATIONS!