The power of sound and the impacts of war dominated the 26th Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival awards, with French doc “07:15 – Blackbird” taking home both the main prize and the cinematography award.
Croatian doc “Deserters,” a study of letters from young Balkan war resistors by Damir Markovina, won the Central and East European award along with sound design honors, while “Over Our Hills,” an ironic look at Swiss military conscripts by Mateo Ybarra, won the Opus Bonum editing prize with its adroit montages of archival material.
The robust Czech competition section also awarded “The Visitors,” Veronika Lišková’s doc on a social anthropologist’s efforts to study a community facing climate crises on a Norwegian archipelago, with a special mention while the Czech editing prize went to Jan Bušta’s look at the 1978 Jim Jones cult mass suicide in Guyana, “a-B-C-D-e-F-G-H-i-JONESTOWN.”