Berlinale Documentary Award and Jury

No Other Land
by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor
produced by: Fabien Greenberg, Bård Kjøge Rønning

© CASKFILMS

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Special Mention
DIRECT ACTION
by Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell
produced by: Guillaume Cailleau

Abbas Fahdel (Iraq / France)

Born in Iraq, Abbas Fahdel studied film and graduated from the Sorbonne, where he studied under Jean Rouch, Eric Rohmer and Serge Daney, among others. After starting out as a film critic, he began his career as a director in 2002. He made three documentaries in Iraq, including Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (2015), which won awards at various festivals. In 2008, he directed his first feature film, Dawn of the World. His second, Yara, which was shot in Lebanon, celebrated its world premiere in Locarno in 2018. The documentary Bitter Bread (2019) was shown at the New York Film Festival before Fahdel returned to Locarno in 2022 with Tales of the Purple House. His first novel, “Ce que le temps fait à la pierre”, will be published in April 2024.

© Inge Zimmermann

Thomas Heise (Germany)

Born in Berlin (GDR) in 1955, Thomas Heise has been working as a writer and director since the 1980s. After three years as a master student of Gerhard Scheumann at the Akademie der Künste (GDR), his documentary films began to attract increasing attention alongside various theatre productions. His work has been invited to the Berlinale Forum seven times, most recently in 2019 with Heimat Is a Space in Time, which was honoured with the German Documentary Film Award and the German Film Critics Award, among others. Heise, who has received awards at numerous international film festivals, has also taught at various universities, for example in Karlsruhe and Vienna, for many years.

Véréna Paravel (France)

Director, artist, and anthropologist Véréna Paravel's work couples an ethnographic sensibility with political and ecological imperatives. Her work is in the permanent collection of New York's MoMA, and has been exhibited at the Tate, documenta 14 and elsewhere. Since 2006, she has been working at Harvard University's Sensory Ethnography Lab. Her award-winning films include Foreign Parts (2010), Leviathan (2012), somniloquies (Berlinale Forum 2017) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), all co-directed, have been shown in Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, Toronto, Venice and other film festivals. Paravel is Visiting Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a member of the Master Class Faculty at Sciences Po Paris' École des Arts Politiques.