Run by SCAM and serving to single out the best documentaries screened in the various selections on the Croisette at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Eye Award, handed out this year by a jury chaired by French director Nicolas Philibert (flanked by Diana Gaye, Elise Jalladeau, Francis Legault and Mina Kavani), was conferred upon two tying films: Ernest Cole, Lost and Found [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] by seasoned Haitian helmer Raoul Peck (presented as a Special Screening in the Official Selection) and The Brink of Dreams [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir
scheda film] by Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir (a feature debut that was premiered in the Critics’ Week).

As for the jury statements, the French-US co-production Ernest Cole, Lost and Found was deemed to be “a film that retraces the journey of a young South African photographer from the Apartheid era. In 1967, at the age of just 27, Ernest Cole authored a book on the horrors of his country’s regime, the publication of which forced him to go into exile in the USA and Europe. He was never able to return to his country of birth. Starting with a clutch of testimonies, but even more impressively, the artist’s own words and his extraordinary photographic work recently unearthed in a Swedish bank, the filmmaker tells of the wanderings of this fragile and rebellious artist, and the solitude and despair that slowly consumed him to such an extent that it made him gradually give up on photography altogether. This tragic fate and the way in which it is recounted, via Ernest Cole’s images and his own words, moved us deeply.”

The Brink of Dreams, meanwhile, “whisks us away to a Coptic village in southern Egypt, following the activities of a small group of young women who are rebelling by forming a street-theatre troupe. Harbouring dreams of becoming actresses, dancers or singers, they try to carve out a place for themselves, defying their families and the patriarchal traditions of their country. The film is at once simple and radiant, an almost unassuming movie that allows us to see, in all its complexity, their struggle to win their freedom as well as the turmoil this struggle creates around them.”