The Slovenia Times

War documentaries awarded at Documentary Film Festival

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The award for best human rights documentary, given out by Amnesty International Slovenia, went to Censored Voices by Mor Loushy, while The Fog of Srebrenica by Samir Mehanović received a special mention.

Censored Voices features until recently censored testimonials by Israeli soldiers involved in the Six-Day War. The audio recordings were created a week after the 1967 war ended.

The recordings unveil how the soldiers of the winning side experienced power, shame, fear, disappointment and the sobering that followed, the judging panel said.

While treated like heroes in Israel, the soldiers are still dogged by questions about interpretations, consequences and the meaning of war, the panel added.

Jury member Urša Menart said the selection was "extraordinary", but the jury was unanimous that Censored Voices was the stand-out film.

The director could not attend the ceremony. The award was received by Roman Lisac, Israel's honorary consul in Slovenia.

Its poetic and symbolic photography meanwhile earned The Fog of Srebrenica a special mention. The evocative music used in the film is in contrast to the horrendous footage images, the panel said.

The film is of great importance not only because it investigates the trauma of recent history but because is shows the brutal present life of all who faced that trauma, the panel added.

The two films competed for the Amnesty International award against three other documentaries - Lampedusa in Winter by Jakob Brossmann, Children of the Transition by Matija Vukšić and Sonita by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami.

The festival featured a total of 19 documentaries and a retrospective dedicated to Ukrainian-Russian filmmaker Sergey Loznits. Programme director Simon Popek aimed for a diverse selection of topical issues interesting to a wide audience.

Loznits is a key post-Soviet author of documentaries. The topics featured include the recent events in the Ukraine, the Nazi occupation of Leningrad and Soviet film propaganda from the 50's and 60s.

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