The Awards
Young Onion Award
For a story of the human condition and people literally facing their own mortality, with the loss of opportunity of creating a legacy. The socio political themes of this film are urgent and timely, and a testament to future generations. This film greatly resonated
with us. We are very honored to give the Young Onion Award to the film, The Tunnel.
Special Mention:
A brave experimental sonic journey of a slowly dying medium throughout the world. A documentary of persistence and keeping hope alive. We would like to give a Special Mention to the film Speak So I Can See You.
Best Moral Approach Award
Reasons of the final decision of the Moral Approach Award is the ability of the movie to capture and powerfully to present one of the main questions in contemporary life – do the states trying to protect people or they are trying to deprive them of freedom and put them in the system?
In a modern society we our surrounded by rules and regulations created to improve our health and to grant a better life.
“Acasa, My Home” manages to portrait a situation where we end up wondering how much these “good intentions” effect other’s people life and what is truly good at the end.
Onion Seed Award
The Student Jury of Makedox 2020 would like to award director Josip Lukić and his team for its capacity to tell a story in a deep and only apparently simple way, introducing the audience in the daily life of the protagonists without judging but with exceptional empathy and compassion.
THE REX WILL SAIL IN creates a portrait of a struggling single mother of three children who works eleven out of twelve months under illegal conditions on a cruise ship abroad. The film succeeds in creating an excellent elliptically told dramaturgy, making it a strong example of the social realist tradition of filmmaking. Every image is carefully chosen, every scene resembles a fragment and all pieces add up to a unique look at contemporary Croatian society facing near complete capitalist exploitation and precarious living conditions.
Main Onion Award
The jury enjoyed watching ten exceptional films, made by ten exceptional filmmakers and we would like to congratulate the selection team of
Makedox for a wonderful program. We watched films that took us around the world and also showed us diversity in genre and in style,
a wide spectrum of what documentary film can be.
As we reached our final deliberation, we were impressed by several films, but we were – unusually – in complete agreement and one film
appeared at the top of each of our lists. It was not difficult at all to decide despite the great value of all the other films. It was a film that
could not be left out or ignored, which brought our various feelings and preferences to a consensus.
The winner is Epicentro by Hubert Sauper.
In Epicentro, Sauper lends us his eyes, we see Cuba through them, and we experience it with all the complexity of his fascination with the island
and its people, with their daily reality, and with all the symbolism of their existence throughout recent history. Through his observation, invention
and analysis, Sauper has created a work crafted to the last detail, an architecture of emotions, with a rare stylistic coherence. Sauper manages to
offer us a seamless viewing experience. Furthermore, it is a film that puts us face to face with questions of our recent geopolitical history, of past
and present, and poses questions of representation and misrepresentation, of the right to represent … and leaves us enchanted and uncertain at
the same time.
Sliced Onion Award
For its originality and creative use of audio interviews combined with a unique visual approach, the Sliced Onion Jury Award of the MakeDox Film Festival goes to Maija Bläfiel for The Fantastic. The emotional, short documentary centers the unheard voices and undiscovered worlds of North Korean refugees. The jury also appreciated how the conversations around cinema and media, in the film, spoke to the individuals’ complicated emotional lives, self-perception, identity, futurism, and concepts of reality.