Ukrainian documentary Mission 200 wins Grand Prix at international film festival in Riga – video
Pravda Ukraine
The International Documentary Film Festival Artdocfest/Riga has announced the award winners in its competition programme. The Grand Prix went to Mission 200, a film by Ukrainian director Volodymyr Sidko.
Source: Sevgil Musaieva, editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, from the awards ceremony in Riga
Details: Mission 200 is a documentary that tells the story of Tetiana Pototska-Yevchuk, a volunteer from Lutsk who has been searching for the bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers and delivering them to their families since the outbreak of the full-scale war.
“Like the mythological Charon who transports souls to the other side of the river Styx, she transports the bodies of dead soldiers. Travelling thousands of kilometres without stopping or sleeping, she transports those who have completed their struggle in this world and sends them on their last journey,” the festival organisers said.
The Best Director Award went to Ukrainian directors Tetiana Doronitsyna and Andrii Lytvynenko for their film Everything Needs to Live, which tells the story of a woman who helps wounded and abandoned animals in the war.
The jury awarded a special prize to Connected, a film about Russian businessman Dmitry Zimin. Orhan Aghazadeh’s film The Return of the Projectionist received a special mention from the jury.
The Artdocfest/Riga Festival jury members included Ivars Seletskis (Latvia), Christine Camdessus (France), and Sevgil Musaieva (Ukraine).
The programme also featured several other Ukrainian films:
- Daddy’s Lullaby by a Ukrainian-Romanian-Croatian team;
- Dear Beautiful Beloved by Austrian director Juri Rechinsky;
- In Limbo, a Polish production by Ukrainian director Alina Maksimenko.
The International Documentary Film Festival Artdocfest was founded in Russia in 2007. After the outbreak of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2014, the competition programme was screened in Riga for the first time. In 2018, the entire competition and the jury moved to Latvia.
Background: Volunteer Tetiana Pototska-Yevchuk told her story in an interview with UP Kultura in which the director of Mission 200 also discussed the making of the award-winning film.
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