Here are all the films selected for the 2019 DIG Awards
The jury, chaired this year by Naomi Klein, will pick and announce the winners in Riccione during the 2019 Festival, from May 30 to June 2.
The fifth edition of DIG Festival, the international conference that celebrates and awards the best investigative documentaries in the world, is fastly approaching.
And it’s already time for some action: the Jury chaired by Canadian author Naomi Klein has selected the finalists from more than 250 nominations coming from 20 countries, across 7 categories: Investigative long and medium, Reportage long and medium, Masters, Shorts, and the Pitch. This year’s submissions focused on wars, corruption and migrations — as well as issues like climate change, the exploitation of natural resources, minors’ rights and socio-economic injustices.
Here are this year’s finalists (congratulations, y’all!).
▸ Category: Investigative Long
Al Jazeera presents Generation Hate, a one-year undercover investigation among the most violent groups of the French far-right close to to Marine Le Pen party.
Australian reporter Evan Williams is the author of Myanmar’s Killing Fields, a journey into the ravaged Myanmar on account of persecutions against the rohingya minority, realised with exclusive video materials also employed by OHCHR.
Isabelle Ducret, Swiss journalist, presents Online Crooks, Stealing Hearts (and Wallets), an inquiry about the international network of online dating scams at the expense of men and women in search for a companion. A work made even more interesting by its peculiar angle: the investigations are not on the field, but internet-based.
▸ Category: Investigative Medium
Emmanuel Morimont, a journalist at the Belgian public broadcast RTBF, in Artificial Pitch, Damned Turf? analyses the health and environmental risks caused by the fibres employed in synthetic fields.
Paul Lewis (The Guardian) with his How Steve Bannon’s far-Right “Movement” Stalled in Europe, studies Steve Bannon’s European and Italian networks.
Roman Anin, reporter for Novaya Gazeta and OCCRP and already known as part of the Panama Papers investigative team, in President’s Bodyguards Wealth delves into the impressive wealth of Putin’s guards.
▸ Category :Reportage Long
Francesca Manocchi and Alessio Romenzi, freelancers, are the authors of Isis, Tomorrow, a documentary on children growing up in Isis territories.
Marjolaine Grappe, with All Dictator’s Men — broadcasted by ARTE — takes us on a journey into the circles that funded the North Korean nuclear programme.
Annie Kelly, reporter for The Guardian, directs The Trap, a work condemning the exploitation of prostitution among female jail detainees in the US.
▸ Category: Reportage Medium
With After War: Afghanistan, Mexican filmmaker Rodrigo Hernàndez reflects on the long-term consequences of war.
Diogo Cardoso and Sofia da Palma Rodrigues, both Portuguese journalists, with their Elalab — Zé Wants to Know Why put in the foreground the damages caused by climate change on African coasts.
Alex Gohari and Léo Mattei represent the French team that with Mexico: Looking for Lost Migrants has investigated “The Beast”, the infamous death train where the majority of refugees travels towards the US.
▸ Category: Shorts
The BBC Africa Eye team signs Anatomy of a Killing, an investigation that succeeded in identifying the perpetrators and the exact location of a crime committed in an unrecorded site of Central Africa. The inquiry went viral after a video was released online and the crime reassembled from thousands of kilometres away using cutting-edge technologies, all open source.
Ibrahim Alshamaly adopts instead more traditional on-site investigation methods for Under the Ground, which shows the alarming medical situation in Hama and Idlib. The hospitals of the two cities, intentionally bombed by the Syrian opposition, Assad’s regime and the Russian army, have been replaced by underground, makeshift structures.
Almudena Toral, a Spanish filmmaker, signs Nightmares and Selective Amnesia, a documentary with reportage features that tells the traumatic experience of Adayanci Pérez, a Guatemalan girl taken from her parents by Trump’s anti-refugees policy.
▸ Category: Masters
The finalists in the Masters section are Bellingcat by Hans Pool, The Cleaners by Hans Block and Morits Riesewieck, and The Panama Papers by Alex Winter.
▸ Category: DIG Pitch
The Pitch funds the pre-production of a new and unreleased work through a contribution of €15.000.
The eight projects shortlisted for 2019 are: El Maestro, by Lorenzo Giroffi and Alfredo Bosco; Erasmus in Gaza, by Chiara Avesani and Matteo Delbò; Hooligan’s Life, by Brando Baranzelli; Iraq Without Rivers by Sara Manisera, Francesca Tosarelli, Arianna Pagani and Silvia Boccardi; Juanto: A Writer from a Country Without Bookstores by Marc Serena; Macelli by Chiara Caprio and Andrea Morabito; Share The City, Destroy Life by Hibai Arbide Aza and Rodrigo Hernández Tejero; We Are Not Our Mothers by Brishkay Ahmed.
