Last week the Documenta Madrid Festival took place, which closed on Saturday and is celebrating its 15th edition this year. Over all these years it has become one of the most important documentary festivals in Spain.
The award for Best Short Film in the International Section went to Saule Marceau, by Juliette Achard, which had previously screened at DocLisboa and Cinéma de Réel, and Absent Wound, by Maryam Tafakory, in the Fugas section, dedicated to the most daring cinema, previously selected in Rotterdam.
The award for Best National Short Film went to Wan Xia. The Last Light of Dusk by Silvia Rey, which also won one of the Madrid en corto awards at the Community of Madrid Short Film Week.
The Documenta celebration has been a good opportunity to review the state of documentary short films on the festival circuit, especially since the second half of last year and so far this year.
This exercise is very interesting, as it makes it possible to identify the titles and filmmakers that are standing out most internationally, learn about new trends, and review the programming lines of these festivals.
Last year I already published a post along these lines, with 16 documentary short films that had been selected and awarded in very prestigious competitions. This year I have focused on the main awards, selecting only 10 short films.
To review them, I have taken into account both documentary-specialist festivals, such as IDFA in Amsterdam, Leipzig, DOCNY, Visions de Réel, Big Sky and Cinéma de Réel, as well as other generalist festivals with a special dedication to documentary, such as Rotterdam (with more daring and avant-garde works), Locarno, Berlin and Sundance.
These festivals have taken place from the second half of 2017 up to now, so these short films are at different stages of their distribution. All of them will be on the festival circuit throughout 2018.
The 10 documentary short films
#1 Zhalanash – Empty Shore by Marcin Sauter (Poland) won Best Documentary Short Film at IDFA in Amsterdam in November last year. It has also won at Camerimage and screened at the Thessaloniki and Budapest festivals.
#2 The Ashes Remain Warm by Mónica Martins Nunes (Cape Verde, Portugal and Germany) received the most important recognition at Leipzig in 2017 by winning the Golden Dove for Best International Short Film. It premiered at Indielisboa at the beginning of that same year.
#3 Traffic Stop, by Kate Davis (United States) won the Grand Jury Prize at DOCNY, one of the most important documentary festivals in the United States. It is produced by HBO and available only in the United States.
#4 Une fille de Ouessant by Éléonore Saintagnan (France and Belgium) had its world premiere at Visions de Réel, where it won the Grand Prize in the short film section.
#5 Koka, The Butcher, by Bence Máté (Germany and Egypt) was the best short film at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in February this year.
#6 The white elephant, by Shuruq Harb (Palestine) recently won Best Short Film at Cinéma de Réel in Paris, which ended in early April.
#7 Mountain Plain Mountain by Araki Yu and Daniel Jacoby (Spain, Japan and the Netherlands), an observational documentary close to media art, won the most important award for short films at Rotterdam at the beginning of this year, the Ammodo Tiger Short Award.
#8 António and Catarina, by Cristina Hanes (Portugal) won the Pardino d’oro for Best Short Film at Locarno last year; it has also screened at DocLisboa and Jihlava. In Spain it has been shown at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Festival.
#9The Men Behind the Wall by Ines Moldavsky (Israel) won the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the Berlinale. Berlin’s short film section is generalist in nature, but in recent years it has been increasingly committed to documentary, with a documentary short winning for several years now.
#10 The Trader (Sovdagari) by Tamta Gabrichidze (Georgia) was Best Non-Fiction Short Film at Sundance. In this case it was acquired by Netflix, where documentary shorts can increasingly be seen, especially in the United States.
The countries with the most award-winning documentaries
The countries with the strongest presence over the last two years have been Poland and Portugal, which have won some of the most important awards, at IDFA as well as Leipzig, Locarno and Berlin. They are followed by other film industries with very high-quality documentaries, such as the Netherlands, the United States and France.
Spain has been present in the awards lists of these festivals in recent years thanks to co-productions, such as The fourth kingdom by Alex Lora and Adan Aliaga, made in the United States, which won a Mini-Doc Award at Big Sky in 2017, and this year Mountain Plain Mountain by Araki Yu and Daniel Jacoby in Rotterdam; although they are not Spanish directors, it is produced by the Fundació Joan Miró.
At the moment it is difficult to see these short films outside the festival environment, although The Trader is already available on Netflix. I hope that little by little they can be seen at Spanish festivals or that there will be opportunities to watch them online.
We are living through one of the best moments for documentary short films.