Docudays is an international human rights documentary film festival. During the festival film productions compete for awards in for different categories. This year the festival presented 62 films from 36 countries.
In the DOCU/SHORT category, dedicated to films less than 45 minutes long, the special mention went to "Zhalanash – Empty Shore" by Marcin Sauter. In support of their decision the jury described the film as a visually strong and well-balanced mediation between (and meditation on) the realities of life and the metaphors of decay that depicts the ruins of the Aral Sea: a post-utopian scenery, inhabited by solitaires whose struggle is outshined by joy.
Eponymous Zhalanash is a port city by the partially dried-up Aral Sea. This place between great water and vast desert used to constitute a prosperous sector of the Soviet economy but now is just a shadow of its former glory. Marcin Sauter’s film is not only about evocative landscape, but, above all, about the lives of people who invested their hopes and expectations in the place between the sea and the desert and now ponder over their solitude among the wrecks of ships and port cranes.
The full list of the awarded films is available on Docudays website.