10/03/2017 - The aptly titled Boobs topped the Doc Market’s eclectic top five list, surpassing Oscars contender I Am Not your Negro at the Digital Library

(l-r) Francis Kandel (Canal +), Hamed Zolfaghari (director, Castle), Greta Stocklassa (director, Kiruna 2.0), Monika Mikusova (RTV Slovakia), Yuri Averof (Anemon Productions) and Michal Kracmer (producer, Kiruna 2.0)

As the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival’s main awards ceremony headed towards its grand finale, the Doc Market handed out its Docs in Progress prizes, honouring the best of the 11 projects taking part in the market’s most vibrant section.

Presented by the international Docs in Progress jury consisting of Yuri Averof (producer, Anemon Productions, Greece), Monika Mikušova (programme acquisitions, RTV Slovakia, Slovakia) and Francis Kandel (programme acquisitions, Canal +, France), the top award of €15,000 in post-production services (offered by 2|35 Inc Post-Production House) was bestowed on Hamed Zolfaghari’s Castle, produced by the director himself and Nina Amin Zadeh for Iran’s Crazy Woodpecker Film Studio.

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Inaugurated this year, the Doc Market’s second prize of €6,500 in music and sound services, entitled the MiSou award, went to Greta Stocklassa’s Kiruna 2.0. The film was produced by Veronika Kührová and Michal Kráčmer for Analog Vision s.r.o and co-produced by FAMU’s Ondřej Šejnoha — both companies representing the Czech Republic.

Meanwhile, the aptly titled and elegantly shot social documentary Boobs (Greece), by Agnes Sklavou and Stelios Tatakis, found itself top of viewers’ selections at the Doc Market’s digital viewing library. Mixing the anatomical with the social and the existential, the documentary seeks to flesh out both the symbolic and tangible significance that breasts bear in the lives of women and those around them.

Appealing to the Agora visitors’ taste for risqué subjects, Boobs is followed by Lea Glob and Mette Carla Albrechtsen’s Venus (Denmark), which offers a sensual exploration of female sexuality through a series of interviews with women in their 20s and 30s in sexually liberated Denmark. Out of 100 women interviewed, 15 appear on screen in a documentary tied for second place with Raoul Peck’s Oscar contender, I Am Not Your Negro [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (USA/France/Belgium/Switzerland). 

Vying for the festival’s International Competition award, Victoria Vellopoulou’s The Extra Mile (Greece) has landed in fourth place. The film follows a hairdresser training for the Arch to Arc Triathlon in an effort to raise awareness and funds for people with physical and mental disabilities. Just behind, Dominikos Ignatiadis’s Village Potemkin (Greece) rounds out the top five, offering a brutal first-person account of the trials and tribulations of former drug users reclaiming their lives in the back streets of an Athens on the brink of social collapse.