These 12 non-fiction entries compete for Best Documentary Film and Best New Documentary Filmmaker. This year, 12 narrative and 12 documentary features will compete for combined unrestricted cash prizes amounting to $100,000, including prizes totaling $50,000 from American Express for the Best New Narrative and Documentary Filmmakers.
Memory, reality, fact and fiction blend to give you a vivid 'feel' for the interviewees' recollections while being acutely aware that this remains a remembered reconstruction of the past.
Avant-garde documentary exploring the life and legacy of Rita, Sue And Bob Too! playwright Andrea Dunbar.
(Country: UK; Year: 2010; Director: Clio Barnard; Stars: Manjinder Virk, Christine Bottomley, Monica Dolan, Neil Dudgeon, Danny Webb, Jimi Mistry, George Costigan, Natalie Gavin)
The stories of three young Americans exploring alternative religion: a Wiccan in California mining country, a New Ager in upstate New York, and a Native American father and sundancer in South Dakota, all yearning for fulfilling spirituality in disparate but often strikingly similar ways.
(Country: US; Year: 2010; Director: Alex Mar)
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Official site
World Premiere
Budrus
Documentary charting a pacifist protest against Israeli incursion.
(Country: Israel, Palestine, US; Year: 2009; Director: Julia Bacha; Writer: Julia Bacha)
North American Premiere
Earth Made Of Glass
Weaves interviews with President Kagame of Rwanda and Jean-Pierre Sagahutu, a survivor of the horrific 1994 genocide. The president and a citizen - bound together by a profound love of country and an unquenchable desire to see the truth revealed - fight to expose the truth behind a murder and France's hidden role in the Rwandan genocide.
(Country: US; Year: 2010; Director: Deborah Scranton; Stars: Paul Kagame, Rose Kabuye, Serge Sagahutu, Jean Pierre Sagahutu)
World Premiere
Feathered Cocaine
Behind drugs, people, and weapons, falcon smuggling has become the world’s most mysterious and profitable illegal trade. Held in highest esteem by the wealthy elite throughout the Persian Gulf, the sporting birds have earned the label “feathered cocaine” as thieves race to ransack them from all parts of the world. This documentary unspools the surprising links between the falcon trade and royal dynasties, the CIA and KGB, the oil industry, and Al Qaeda.
Bad rugby and fantasy sex fail to win the thrill-a-minute prize for originality.
A season of piss poor rugby in Finland and what the players think about sex.
(Country: Finland/Germany; Year: 2009; Director: Mika Ronkainen; Writer: Mika Ronkainen; Stars: Matti Keränen, Mikko Koljonen, Roger Holden, Tuomo Jaakkonen, Jarmo Stoor, Ana Vidal)
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This is a powerfully atmospheric film that goes beyond the conventional techniques of documentary to communicate concepts we might otherwise struggle to grasp.
A documentary asking what we can do with nuclear waste that will remain dangerous for a hundred thousand years.
(Country: Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Italy; Year: 2010; Director: Michael Madsen; Writer: Michael Madsen, Jesper Bergmann; Stars: Timo Äikäs, Carl Reinhold Bråkenhjelm, Mikael Jensen, Berit Lundqvist, Wendla Paile, Esko Roukola, Sami Savonrinne, Timo Seppälä, Juhani Vira, Peter Wikberg)
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Monica and David are in love. Truly, blissfully in love. They also happen to have Down syndrome. Alexandra Codina’s affectionate and heartwarming documentary is an intimate, year-in-the-life portrait of two child-like spirits with adult desires. Supported (and, for more than 30 years, sheltered) by endlessly devoted mothers, Monica and David prepare for their fairy tale wedding and face the realities of married life afterward.
(Country: US; Year: 2009; Director: Alexandra Codina)
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North American Premiere
Sons Of Perdition
In the polygamist community cultivated by the notorious (and now incarcerated) “prophet” Warren Jeffs, women are a commodity, children are reared to be ignorant, and free thought is surrendered. For a group of teenage boys, the desire for autonomy means banishment from their homes and families. This fascinating documentary explores the heartbreaking losses and hopeful determination of these exiles as they struggle to make new lives in mainstream America.
(Country: US; Year: 2010; Director: Tyler Measom, Jennilyn Merten)
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World Premiere
Thieves By Law
(Ganavim ba Hok)
A front-row invitation into the living rooms and offices of some of the most controversial and elite head honchos in the Russian mafia.
(Country: Israel, Germany, Spain; Year: 2010; Director: Alexander Gentelev)
Despite the fact that there is easily enough material here to have made individual documentaries on both men, a virtue is made of marrying them together.
Tracking the rise of 'narco-soccer' through the lives and deaths of footballer Andrés Escobar and, unrelated, drug lord Pablo Escobar.
(Country: Colombia, US; Year: 2010; Director: Jeff Zimbalist, Michael Zimbalist; Writer: Michael Zimbalist)
The Woodmans are a family united in their belief that art-making is the highest form of expression and an essential way of life, but it’s only photographer daughter Francesca who achieves worldwide acclaim- after a tragedy that would forever scar the family.
(Country: US, China, Italy; Year: 2010; Director: C Scott Willis)
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