Filmmaker Maka Gogaladze wins ZagrebDox Pro award for documentary

Film director Maka Gogaladze was unveiled among winners of ZagrebDox Pro, a pitching platform of the ZagrebDox documentary film festival, for her work Ever Since I Know Myself.

The director earned the ZagrebDox Pro Online Mentor Award, one of four prizes handed out by organisers in an online event due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Produced by Formo studio, the documentary was presented by Gogaladze in a video-sharing format involving participating directors with their projects. The pitching was held in addition to a workshop for participants of the platform.

Ever Since I Know Myself is a look at education received by children across Georgia in a bid to explore the identities the country is attempting to adopt for itself in the world.

Georgians with a long Soviet past and strong traditional mindset try to adopt a new, European identity. I travel around the country meeting different children and observing the process of their education to explore who we are and how we want to be presented - Maka Gogaladze

With her work previously selected as part of the 2019 Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries, the filmmaker has now been awarded a year-long online mentorship from Cecilia Lidin, a producer and Danish Film Institute commissioner for documentaries, through the ZagrebDox Pro prize.

Gogaladze has previously worked in photography and teaches the profession at the Media Lab of the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs. She became interested in documentary filmmaking while studying at the institute. She was also part of last year's Summer School series of the CinéDOC-Tbilisi International Documentary Film Festival with her prize-winning film.

The pitching platform of the Croatian festival brings together directors and producers working on in-production projects. Guided by select mentors they work to prepare pitching for their work to professionals from cinema and television industry.

The programme is held with support from Creative Europe, Croatian Audiovisual Centre, City of Zagreb and Croatian Film Directors' Guild.