Winners & Bestsellers

In Russia, juvenile crime gets the same treatment in court as crimes committed by adults. Alone in Four Walls, shot in a youth prison, is filled with sorrow, and the looks of convicted boys and young men grab the viewer’s attention from the very beginning. Even small boys talk about their crimes and show off their tattoos like grown-up prisoners, and lively, socially talented young men talk to the camera, telling their chilling tales openly.

Christian Poveda’s film has an appropriate name. Life in San Salvador, ruled by two violent gangs, really is crazy and fragile. The killings have continued for years and there are funerals every day. The patching up of bullet wounds, their treatment and comparison are a daily phenomenon. The “maras”, boasting wild tattoos, are a by-product of globalisation, imports from the streets of Los Angeles. After serving their sentences in the United States, the gang members were deported back to El Salvador. Crime has spread to other Central American countries from there. The lethal sense of community in the gangs offers 14,000 young people security they did not find elsewhere. Emblems carved into skin show which gang their bearer belongs to.

Street artist Blu has been noted for his building-sized murals as well as for unique animations made on walls. Director Lorenzo Fonda travels with Blu through Latin American countries, from Mexico to Argentina in order to film the artist's working methods and sources of inspiration in a foreign environment.

Is it harder for the blind to find happiness and their place in the world than for the seeing? Juraj Lehotsky opens up the world of the blind by showing four stories about blind people’s happiness. A music teacher and his wife find strength to overcome life’s problems by losing themselves fully in a music-filled imaginary world. A Romany boy finds love despite his blindness and the prejudices against his ethnicity. A teenage girl searches for happiness and acceptance on internet discussion forums like others of her age.

Sensations of touch and sound create a world more sensitive to emotion. The worlds of the blind and the seeing differ greatly in how emotions are processed, but what is common to us all is our own, unique way of experiencing love and happiness.

One day in 1971, Philippe Petit sneaked with friends into the Notre-Dame Cathedral in the small hours, and stretched a wire between the towers. After dawn, he walked along the wire from one tower to another, baffling the Parisians. Petit was arrested. A couple of years later, he did the trick in Australia, where the wire was stretched between the famous towers of the Harbour Bridge. Again, he was arrested, but there was something wilder yet to come.

Only old people are left in the derelict village of Goleshovo in a forgotten, remote corner of the Bulgarian mountains. And what a village: no running water, no telephone, and people people that could be from a story by Chekhov. They talk to the camera like an old friend, sing to the camera, cry, laugh, drink, pray and joke.

Kasim Abid’s Life After the Fall, winner of several awards, is a story of the life of the director's family and the changes they go through in the years after the fall of the regime, having returned to Iraq after 30 years.