Ecumenical Jury:
Jacques Guillon (France/Switzerland), Jacques Michel (Switzerland), Nathalie Roncier (France), Bernd Wolpert (Germany)

ECUMENICAL JURY AWARD

Araïs al-Teïn (Dolls of Clay) by Nouri Bouzid, Tunisia 2002

"We have chosen this film for its high cinematographic quality and its universal language. A film which encourages respect for the rights of the humble, whether children or women, but also of men, inviting them to grow in dignity."

The Ecumenical Jury Award carries a check of 5.000 SFr, courtesy of "Brot für alle" und "Fastenopfer".

Synopsis:
The village families entrust their young daughters to Omrane, a former household employee. The girls are taken to Tunis to work as maids. Little Feddha, who has just been engaged, is unable to adapt to her new life. When Rebeh, another village girl, runs away, Feddha has a break. Off she goes on a venture with Omrane, who is in love with Rebeh, searching the town for the one who escaped to be free. With a rare mastery of form, the film suggests more than it says; it creates atmospheres rather than situations and summons without giving ready-made solutions. Metaphors of action – that keep an adequate distance between vocation and translation – eloquently express the characters’ moods, rendering dialogues scarce. Thus little Feddha puts together and undoes her clay dolls, plunging herself in an imaginary world that allows her to save a bit of the childhood from which she was prematurely deprived. Far from endulging in moralism or doctrinal discourse, the director prefers for the viewer to explain things for himself; he wishes to remain at the level of emotion: thus he goes deep into the characters and their solitude without affording any explanation.

MENTION

Zendan-e Zanan (Women’s Prison) by Manijeh Hekmat, Iran 2002

This committed Iranian filmmaker clearly demonstrates that in order to change the world, it is necessary that we all listen to each other and that we change our vision and attitudes. This film is an hymn to solidarity and freedom, in spite of imprisonment.

Synopsis:

Zendan-e Zanan is the story of the daily life – over twenty years – of several women imprisoned for acts qualified as misdemeanours by the successive political regimes in Iran. At the heart of this collective portrait that mirrors the general evolution of the customs and ideas of the country, shines the surprising duo, whose complicity grows over the years, of the woman who directs the prison and one of the prisoners – who is freed in the end. It is a strange thing, this film whose plot appears rather thin a priori, since the only setting is that of an enclosed prison, and the only motor to keep the narrative going is the time that passes there. How is it that the result is nevertheless enthralling? Firstly because it is subtly fashioned from scenes that never cease to unveil each other – like folding-screens rotating on their axis and gradually ramifying the scene; secondly because nothing is ever over-played by the actresses nor over-shown by the director (a woman). Thus each scene of the film, each detail of each image and each syllable callously uttered take on the density of a fatal reality, to the extent of mutating the fiction of Zendan-e Zanan into a means of prodigious documentation on a given moment in modern Iran.

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