Tbilisi CineDOC film festival 2015 was “best one yet”, say organisers

A Georgian-Latvian documentary and a Slovankian film scooped the two top awards at this year’s CineDOC international film festival, held in Tbilisi for the third time.

The two documentaries and a handful of other entries were selected as category winners from about 40 local and foreign documentaries that were chosen to feature in the annual competition.

On Saturday evening after six days of screening, Slovakian documentary Comeback and Georgian-Latvian piece Double Aliens were awarded their main prizes. These two films triumphed in the International Competition and Focus Caucasus sections respectively, while the festival’s organisers presented five other prizes to other category winners.

Organisers celebrated the conclusion of this year’s festival with a tweet:

#CineDoc2015 is officially finished! THANK YOU to all the filmmakers, invited guests, staff members and volunteers!! #BestOneYet

— CinéDOC-Tbilisi (@CinedocTbilisi) October 25, 2015

The coveted prize of the International Competition category went to Slovakia’s entry Comeback, directed by Miro Remo. It pipped nine other productions in this category.

Remo’s 2014 work followed two recently released convicts as they searched for a way back into normal life and reintegration into society. The documentary showed their struggle to adapt to the world that had changed much while they were incarcerated.

See the trailer for Comeback by director Miro Remo below:

The second principal award of the festival, the Focus Caucasus prize, went to Georgian-Latvian documentary Double Aliens by director Ugis Olte. The piece looked at the experiences of the filmmaker and Georgian photographer Daro Sulakauri as they travelled to the mountainous Samtskhe-Javakheti region in Georgia’s south.

The film opened the 2015 Riga International Film Festival on October 16 and was praised in a review by www.baltictimes.com for its visual quality.

The film is a triumph. Its two cinematographers deserve credit for taking the cinema-goer on a searing journey across the rugged terrain, and into the day-to-day lives of local residents in the region. It is a film that feels, at times, like it could have been shot on the surface of another planet,” Richard Martyn-Hemphill wrote.

See the trailer for the Focus Caucasus award winner Double Aliens below:

A joint Belgian-Israeli project titled Twilight of a Life collected two awards at the CineDOCTbilisi 2015. The documentary, directed by Sylvain Biegeleisen, received the Special Mention award in the International Competition category and the Audience Award.

This year the Focus Caucasus category’s Special Mention prize was awarded to Armenian entry How to Cross, while the CineDOC Student Jury - selected by organisers from Georgian universities – named Lithuania’s Master and Tatyana as their favourite.

The Young Award of the annual film festival was awarded to the 2014 production A Goat for a Vote from the Netherlands.