Awards List

Trailers of Finalists

Back to Finalists 2013

  • Pre-school Category
  • Primary Category
  • Youth Category
  • Continuing Education Category
  • Welfare Education Category
  • Innovative Media Category

Welfare Education Category

*Countries/regions are listed in alphabetical order.

Hatsumi - One Grandmother's Journey Through the Japanese Canadian Internment

  • Entering organization:Walking Through Pictures Productions Inc.
  • Canada
  • TV /Film/Video

Hatsumi presents the documentary story of a Japanese-Canadian woman whose life was irreversibly changed when the Canadian government opted to classify Canadians of Japanese descent as "enemy aliens", took away their property and forcibly confined them during World War Two. Chris Hope is Nancy Hatsumi Okura’s grandson. Chris agrees to take Nancy on a journey across Canada to the locations of her internment experience if she will agree to overcome shikata ga nai to tell him the story of her internment experience for the first time.
Through a process of intergenerational and intercultural interaction, Chris learns shocking details about the internment and that the vast archive of internment photographs left to him by his grandfather contains pictures his grandfather took with an illegal camera that he smuggled through the internment at great personal risk. In the course of making the film, Chris also learns that he has a grand uncle in Japan and makes his first ever trip to Japan to reunite Nancy with her brother.
Chris's goal in creating the film was to craft a first-person account of the internment that could be used by educators to help bring this unfortunate but critical chapter in Canadian history to life for future generations of students. On completion, in addition to fulfilling its educational aspirations, as an intergenerational “road movie” Hatsumi succeeds as a testament to the universal strength of the human spirit and as a tribute to the strong bond of love that exists between grandparents and their grandchildren.

Alphee of the Stars

  • Entering organization:National Film Board of Canada (NFB)
  • Canada
  • TV /Film/Video

Alphee has a rare genetic disorder that hampers her development. She has struggled with much, yet - like a little miracle filled with love - continues to defy medical expectations. After her parents intuitively reject the idea of placing her in a specialized classroom, they move their family to the Swiss Alps for a year. Here, her father - filmmaker Hugo Latulippe - takes advantage of the time away to focus on his fairy-like daughter’s learning, in hopes of eventually integrating her into a regular classroom. This film is a moving declaration of love from a father to his daughter. It is also the story of a gamble: stealing away for a year in order to try and change the course of events.

By putting the spotlight on a most unusual girl with seemingly magical powers, he asks us to go beyond appearances. At the same time, Latulippe affirms his belief in the importance of schooling with a human dimension - of schools that embrace equality of opportunity for all children. Through its tender and patient eye, the film challenges our assumptions and reveals an unknown world that may have escaped us in our daily rush.

This film contributes to the educational discussion and debate on school integration of children in regular classrooms with disabilities and diseases with compromised physical and neurological development. The filmmaker presents an alternative approach to maximize the abilities his child which ultimately benefits all children in the classroom.

SAND WARS

  • Entering organization:ARTE France
  • France
  • TV /Film/Video

By the end of the 21st century, beaches will be a thing of the past. That is the alarming forecast of a growing number of scientists and environmental NGOs. Sand has become a vital commodity for our modern economies: we use it in our toothpaste, detergents, and cosmetics, and computers and mobiles couldn’t exist without it. Our houses, skyscrapers, bridges and airports are all basically made with sand: it has become the most widely consumed natural resource on the planet after fresh water. The worldwide construction boom fuelled by emerging economies and increasing urbanization has led to intensive sand extraction on land and in the oceans, with damaging environmental impacts. Sand Wars takes us around the world as it tracks the contractors, sand smugglers and unscrupulous property developers involved in the new gold rush, and meets the environmentalists and local populations struggling to reverse the threat to the future of this resource that we all take for granted.

The Adventure of MuMo, the mobile museum

  • Entering organization:APRES Production
  • France
  • TV /Film/Video

MuMo is a Mobile Museum funded by L’art á l’enfance whose objective is to raise children’s awareness of contemporary art through a travelling museum housed in a specially-designed lorry-driven container. Upon reaching its destination, the container opens and transforms into a museum with three distinct spaces, each of which takes the child into a different world: painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, design… The featured artists, James Turrell, Ghada Amer, Daniel Buren, Yong Ping Huang, Pierre Huygue, Paul McCarthy, Nari Ward, Lawrence Weiner, Cherry Samba, Maurizio Cattelan, Jim Lambie, Roman Signer, among others, have each proposed a work they specifically created for the Mobile Museum.

The Kamaishi Miracle

  • Entering organization:Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK)
  • Japan
  • TV /Film/Video

When the devastating tsunami triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake engulfed the town of Kamaishi, something extraordinary happened in what has become known as “The Kamaishi Miracle”. Although the children were out of school and beyond adult supervision when the tsunami struck, all 184 children of the local elementary school had survived. Making full use of their knowledge, the children scattered to safety, leading little ones by the hand, and urging adults to evacuate. Their courageous and thoughtful judgment saved many lives.
Professor Toshitaka Katada of Gunma University, who serves as Kamaishi City’s disaster prevention advisor, taught the children about the “three rules of survival” that led to the miracle. How were Katada’s three rules executed? This documentary tells the children’s story through animation and interviews, and gives us hints on future disaster preparedness.

Poem of Death

  • Entering organization:NTR
  • Netherlands
  • TV /Film/Video

In Amsterdam only, a yearly average of fifteen people die whose funeral will be unattended. Be it nameless people, or people with a name, but with one thing in common: there will be no friends or family at their burial or cremation.

Led by poet F. Starik a group of Dutch poets, Menno Wigman en Maria Barnas among them, have united in the ‘Pool of Death’. They accompany the lonely deceased to the grave by means of a poem specially written for the occasion.

In the documentary Poem of Death we follow the course of such a ‘lonely funeral’. We see the municipal civil servants organise the solemn occasion; we witness how the people at the funeral parlour care for the corpse and the coffin, and how the poets prepare for their recital at the cemetery. There is often so little information available that it is not clear how the deceased ended up in his isolated situation. Perhaps by choice or by circumstance; nobody will ever know. The poet is therefore compelled to interpret; to invent.

In an evocative visual manner, Poem of Death gives us insight into the incomprehensible turns a human life can take, focusing on that last stretch between the death and the burial of a person who may no longer have been known in life, but who will yet be remembered after death.

Inocente

  • Entering organization:Shine Global, Inc
  • United States
  • TV /Film/Video

Academy Award® winner Inocente is the inspiring coming-of-age story of a 15-year old girl of the same name in California. Though homeless and undocumented, she refuses to give up on her dream of being an artist, proving that the hand she has been dealt does not define her - her dreams do. Told in her own words, we learn that Inocente’s life is at a turning point and that for the first time she has decided to take control of her own destiny. Her talent has finally been noticed. If she can create a body of work in time, she has an opportunity to put on her first art show, bringing her that much closer to realizing her dreams. INOCENTE is both a timeless story about the transformative power of art and a timely snapshot of the new face of homelessness in America, children.

In addition to the critical acclaim, the filmmakers have built an outreach campaign to educate youth about the issues in the film. We have created a free companion standards-based curriculum for grades 7-12 and white papers and powerpoints for university-level courses to encourage classroom use by teachers. We also worked with the Hot Docs Film Festival school program on another study guide that meets Canadian educational standards. Additionally, the producers have partnered with arts organizations and museums to develop companion arts workshops that help youth explore the issues presented in our films in a non-traditional way while expressing themselves.

Justice for my Sister

  • Entering organization:ARTEVISTA FILMS
  • United States
  • TV /Film/Video

"Justice for my Sister" is an award-winning documentary - a ‘David versus Goliath’ story about the determination of Guatemalan Rebeca to find the assassin of her sister Adela and bring him to justice. Despite opposition, corruption and prejudice, she seeks justice in a country where femicide (killing of women) is commonplace.

One day, 27-year-old Adela leaves home to go to work. She never returned. Adela is found by the side of the road, beaten up beyond all recognition by her former boyfriend. More than 6,000 women have been killed in Guatemala over the past ten years. In only two percent of the cases a murderer was convicted. Public opinion, fuelled by the media, is that victims ‘have probably asked for it’. Adela’s sister, Rebeca, has the courage to stand up against Guatemala’s notoriously corrupt legal system on her own. Her three-year struggle is full of setbacks: a record that is missing, a judge who is accused of killing his own wife and witnesses who are too afraid to testify. Completely transformed, Rebeca emerges as a leader in her rural community with a message for others: justice is possible.

This film aims to bring awareness to audiences about the issue of violence against women in its various manifestations. We put a human face on an issue that has historically been silenced, which encourages unlikely allies like young men to take a stand, and gives strength to victims of violence to break the silence.

Little Children Big Challenges

  • Entering organization:Sesame Workshop
  • United States
  • TV /Film/Video

The number of children with an incarcerated parent has increased nearly 80% in the past 20 years. Nearly 2.7 million children have a parent in state or federal prison, yet few resources exist to support young children and families with this lifechanging circumstance. In response, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, unveils its newest, bilingual (English/Spanish) initiative, Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration, for families with young children (ages 3-8) who have an incarcerated parent. This resource will only be distributed through targeted outlets in communities by organizations, partners and individuals who reach these families. The content was distributed via both physical (dvd kit) and digital methods. As with all content produced by Sesame Workshop, this outreach initiative began with formative evaluation, which included consulting with an advisory board of key experts in child development, early childhood, and mental health fields, in addition to experts working with incarcerated families to guide and shape key content messages and initiative goals.

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