Sir Nicholas Winton to attend FIAT/IFTA Award

The three winners of the FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievement Awards 2012 will be announced at an award ceremony at the British Film Institute in London South Bank on September 29th, 6.30pm. 

 

FIAT/IFTA are delighted to announce that centenarian Sir Nicholas Winton will be attending the award ceremony as one of our honoured guests and will be discussing elements of his extraordinary life: born in 1909, he dedicated himself to humanitarian work and was knighted in 2002 in recognition of his work on the Czech Kindertransporte.

 

Ten shortlisted projects in three categories will compete for the prestigious FIAT/IFTA Awards

 

In the category “Best Use of Archive” the following three documentaries have made it onto the final shortlist: “A Cosa Serve Il Cinema” is an impressive biography of the great Italian film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci by Daniela Piccioni of RaiTeche. Also nominated in this category is “Past Dreams of the Future”, a wonderful portrayal of the adolescent dreams of a young girl, by Michelle Francati of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. The third documentary is the very touching “Nicky’s Family” by Matej Minač and Patrik Pašš, about “British Schindler” Nicholas Winton, who rescued almost 700 children, mainly Jewish, from German-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War .

 

 

The Japanese Broadcasting Corporation NHK is shortlisted in the category “Most Innovative Use of Archive” for its website-project “The Great East Japan Earthquake Archives”, which offers a huge range of reconstructions of the tsunami disaster. Also in this category is the deeply moving web documentary “Shalom Amigos”, which tells the almost unknown story of 5,000 Jewish refugees, from their encountering the inhabitants of the Dominican Republic to their integration into the population over the generations, and was made by INA-directors Adrien Walter and Emmanuel Clemenceau. The “Media Encyclopedia Club” is an innovative media community portal from the Media Asset Management Centre of the Shanghai Media Group. It serves as a shared platform for a vast amount of media content, with over 10 million items and content information. Also nominated in this category is “Storia SSR” an interactive supplement to a book about the history of the “Radio und Fernsehen in der Schweiz” [“Radio and Television in Switzerland”] from 1983 to 2011, compiled by the Swiss SRG. 

 

Finally, nominations for the category “Best Archive Preservation Project” include “The East Timor Audiovisual Archive” installation by Max Stahl - documented by Peter Gordon in “Bloodshet” – which shows how archive footage changed the course of a nation and led to the creation of a national heritage. “Images for the Future” by the Consortium of the same name in the Netherlands is nominated for its impressive project in preserving and making available the country’s cultural patrimony. Another remarkable nomination is “The Terrestrials” by American Scenes & Staccato Films, which documents how students built up an archive of Timothy Leary’s huge audiovisual legacy.

 

Award nominees will be recognized for their exceptional work throughout the event. The award ceremony will be followed by a discussion with producers and directors, who will give a more detailed account of some of the shortlisted and winning projects. The award ceremony evening will be recorded by MBC London and made available on www.fiatifta.org.

 

The FIAT/IFTA Programme & Production Jury drew up a shortlist from a record number of entries in May 2012. For the first time ever, the FIAT/IFTA Programme & Production Commission then put the ten shortlisted projects to a public online vote on www.fiatifta.org, which was widely participated in by FIAT/IFTA members as well as by the internet community.

 

The Fédération Internationale des Archives de Télévision / International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA) was founded in 1977. The FIAT/IFTA Award is now being presented for the 19th time.