Alina Gorlova: Celebs Rumors

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor Amber Fares’ “Coexistence, My Ass!” took home the prize for Best Rough Cut during the awards ceremony for Forum, the industry section of documentary film festival IDFA, on Wednesday. Mohammed Almughanni’s “Son of the Streets” won the award for Best Pitch, and the DocLab award went to “Turbulence” by Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts.

Lise Pedersen “The Days I Would Like to Forget” by Ukrainian film collective Tabor, which picked up the top industry award at international documentary festival Visions du Réel, is a trilogy project that examines the consequences of war. It is directed by Alina Gorlova (“No Obvious Signs,” “This Rain Will Never Stop”), Maksym Nakonechnyi (“Butterfly Vision,” “This Rain Will Never Stop”), Simon Mozgovyi (“Salt From Bonneville,” “The Winter Garden’s Tale”) and Yelizaveta Smith (“Solitude,” “Butterfly Vision”), who have been working together and documenting the war in their country for close to a decade. The project is divided into three 70-minute chapters: “Human & War,” which examines the impact of war on everyday life, “Death & Life,” which focuses on the perception of death during the Russian-Ukrainian war, and “Space & Time,” which investigates the link between the war in Ukraine and other parts of the world.

Lise Pedersen A group of Ukrainian filmmakers have won the top industry award at Swiss international documentary film festival Visions du Réel with their project “The Days I Would Like to Forget,” divided into three chapters, each of which will explore a different phenomenon of war. Filmmakers Alina Gorlova (“No Obvious Signs,” “This Rain Will Never Stop”), Maksym Nakonechnyi (“Butterfly Vision,” “This Rain Will Never Stop”), Simon Mozgovyi (“Salt from Bonneville,” “The Winter Garden’s Tale”) and Yelizaveta Smith (“Solitude,” “Butterfly Vision”) of independent Ukrainian production company Tabor were awarded the Vision du Sud Est prize, handed out to the best project from the South (Africa, Latin America and Asia) or Eastern Europe.

Mark Schilling Japan CorrespondentSkip City International D-Cinema Festival, a leading launching pad for emerging Japanese and world filmmakers, has unveiled the line-up for its 19th edition, which will be held July 16-24, 2022, at venues in Kawaguchi, a Tokyo suburb. In addition to its first physical screenings in three years, the festival will present an online segment July 21-27.The president of the international competition jury is Terajima Shinobu, winner of the best actress silver bear at the 2010 Berlinale for her performance in the Wakamatsu Koji’s WWII drama “Caterpillar.” The president of the Japanese film competition jury is cinematographer Ashizawa Akiko.The opening film is “Deadly School,” a coming-of-age ensemble drama about high school girls prepping for their school festival, directed by three-time Skip City winner Isobe Teppei and adapted from Asakusa Kaoru’s hit play.

Lise Pedersen As the boundaries in cinema become increasingly fluid, emerging filmmakers whose films have been selected at the Cannes Film Festival have been discussing their journey from documentary to fiction at the Cannes Market’s Cannes Docs sidebar.Curated by the Documentary Assn. of Europe, the panel on Sunday brought together Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechnyi, the director of Un Certain Regard title “Butterfly Vision,” and Erige Sehiri (“Railway Men”), the Tunisian director of “Under the Fig Leaves,” which had its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar.The titles are fiction debuts for Nakonechnyi and Sehiri, who are both experienced documentary filmmakers.Inspired by the conflict in Ukraine’s Eastern Donbas region that has been ongoing since 2014, “Butterfly Vision” is the story of a young Ukrainian soldier who returns home after being held captive for months and discovers she is pregnant after being raped by her Russian warden.

Jennie Punter Last week Darya Bassel, the curator of Docudays UA’s industry platform, returned to her home in Kyiv and found herself smiling “like a crazy person” to be back at work and resuming something of a daily routine. “I’m still sitting 12 hours a day with my laptop,” she said during Slava Ukraini, an early morning session that kicked off Day 2 of Hot Docs’ Industry LIVE conference.“There are just some additional tasks on my to-do list,” she continued.

Seven Ukrainian filmmakers, who are remaining in the country as Russia continues its invasion, have spoken out about their experiences on the front line of the war in their country. Directors Valentyn Vasyanovych, Roman Bondarchuk, Nariman Aliev, Maryna Er Gorbach , Antonio Lukich, Alina Gorlova and producer Darya Bassel have all called upon the international film and television community to issue cultural sanctions against Russia.

Kaleem Aftab Kiev-based Alina Gorlova vividly remembers the first time she saw the disputed region of Donbass, in the east of Ukraine and to the southwest of Russia. “I saw this nature in black-and-white,” she says, “because there was a lot of slag heaps in these industrial landscapes.”A graduate of the Karpenko-Kary Kyiv National University of Theater, Film and TV, Gorlova had previously made a meditative, hour-long film, “Kholodny Yar,” about the eponymous region in the heart of the Ukraine.

Jessica Kiang War is blood and bombs and politics, but not in Alina Gorlova’s fascinating, fraught documentary “This Rain Will Never Stop.” Elliptically following 20-year-old Andriy Suleiman, a student Red Cross worker who “left one war for another” when his family fled Hasukah, Syria for his mother’s hometown of Lysychansk, Ukraine, this defiantly oblique, uncannily composed film instead reduces actual conflict to a dully thunderous, far-off roar. “It was fine for a while, but for the past four days there has been gunfire again,” says a disembodied voice from home over Skype.