The European Film Academy has announced the ten non-fiction features up for the 2009 Prix Arte for Best European Documentary.
The nominated documentaries are:
THE BEACHES OF AGNES (Les Plages d’Agnès)
Agnès Varda, France
BELOW SEA LEVEL, Gianfranco Rosi, Italy / USA
BURMA VJ, Anders Østergaard, Denmark
COOKING HISTORY (Ako Sa Varia Dejiny)
Peter Kerekes, Slovakia / Austria / Czech Republic
THE DAMNED OF THE SEA (Les Damnés de la Mer)
Jawad Rhalib, Belgium
DEFAMATION, Yoav Shamir, Denmark / Austria / Israel / USA
THE HEART OF JENIN (Das Herz von Jenin)
Leon Geller & Marcus Vetter, Germany
PIANOMANIA, Lilian Franck & Robert Cibis, Germany / Austria
THE SOUND OF INSECTS – RECORD OF A MUMMY
(Das Summen der Insekten – Bericht einer Mumie)
Peter Liechti, Switzerland
THE WOMAN WITH THE 5 ELEPHANTS (Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten)
Vadim Jendreyko, Switzerland / Germany
Topics range from the consequences of overfishing in Moroccan waters (The Damned of the Sea) to veteran filmmaker Agnès Varda's autobiographical essay The Beaches of Agnès; from the 2007 anti-government protests in which thousands of Burmese monks took part (Burma VJ) to a portrait of a homeless community located in a former military base 250 km from Los Angeles (Below Sea Level); from a debate featuring divergent views on the role of anti-Semitism in today's world (Defamation) to the work of army cooks from World War II to the Russian-Chechen War (Cooking History).
The members of the documentary jury are:
Nino Kirtadzé, documentary filmmaker, France/Georgia
Franz Grabner, producer / editor ORF, Austria
Viktor Kossakovsky, documentary filmmaker, Russia
Upon invitation by the city of Vilnius, this year’s documentary jury will convene in the Lithuanian capital to screen the nominated films and decide on the winner. (That's unfortunate. Considering the Lithuanian parliament's new anti-gay law that would potentially criminalize, among other things, gay film festivals, the EFA judges should have gone elsewhere to vote on the best European documentary of the year.)
In association with the European culture channel ARTE, the winner will be presented at the 22nd European Film Awards Ceremony on Saturday, 12 December, in Bochum, Germany.