Eight Nordic documentaries compete for Göteborg’s Dragon Award

by Jorn Rossing Jensen

26/01/2015 - “Nordic documentary filmmakers are increasingly turning their cameras on the world,” said artistic director Jonas Holmberg

Eight Nordic documentaries compete for Göteborg’s Dragon Award

The Look of Silence by Joshua Oppenheimer

The Göteborg International Film Festival, which opened on Friday (23 January), is not only presenting the Dragon Award for Best Nordic Film, which comes with a SEK 1 million (€105,000) cheque; it will also honour the Best Nordic Documentary with a Dragon, albeit accompanied by a more modest SEK 100,000 (€10,500).

Eight documentaries from the Nordic countries – Denmark (2), Finland (1), Norway (1) and Sweden (4) – are competing for the prize, including US director Joshua Oppenheimer’s Danish production The Look of Silence [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. The movie is the “companion piece” to his Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which won five awards when it was launched last year at the Venice Film Festival.

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“The contenders in this year's programme confirm the trend that Nordic documentary filmmakers are increasingly turning their cameras on the world – they want to operate in an international context,” said the festival’s new artistic director, Jonas Holmberg, adding that the first prize is one of the largest documentary awards in the Nordic countries.

The full list of entries is as follows: Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence (Denmark), Camilla Nielsson’s Democrats (Denmark), Amir Escandari’s Pixadores [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Finland), Solveig Melkeraaen’s Good Girl (Norway), Frida Kempff’s Winter Buoy (Sweden), Frida and Lasse Barkfors’ Pervert Park (Sweden), Magnus Gertten’s Every Face Has a Name (Sweden), and Lina Maria Mannheimer’s The Ceremony (Sweden).

The festival, which in 2014 recorded 135,000 admissions, has almost 500 films from 89 countries on show at its 38^th edition (see the news), which closes on 2 February. Swedish actress Noomi Rapace will be back in Sweden to introduce her latest US picture, The Drop, and Norwegian actress-director Liv Ullmann will screen her Miss Julie [+see also:
trailer
interview: Liv Ullmann
film profile]. Also on the guest list are French director Olivier Assayas, Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase, Danish director Bille August and Belgium's Michaël R Roskam (The Drop).