Category Documentary 2024

1. Kovar Republic – Under the Sky and Earth of Labinština

Category: Documentary

Title: Kovar Republic – Under the Sky and Earth of Labinština

Company: Croatian Radiotelevision (HRT)/Croatian Radio (HR)

Author: Đino Đivanović

Producer: Nikica Klobučar

Sound Engineer: Srđan Nogić

Other key staff: Alen & Nenad Sinkauz (Composers), Adriana Kramarić (Music Producer); Galib Ahmičević, Tullio Vorano, Andrea Matošević, Franko Zidarić, Mladen Bajramović, Glorija Paliska, Olja Višković, Marijan Milevoj (Speaking in the program and helped in the realization of it).

Duration: 51:05

Summary

The radio documentary "Kovar Republic - under the sky and land of Labinština" by Đino Đivanović portrays the rich, and for many people tragic history of mining in Istria.

Bordered by the river Raša, Učka and the Kvarner coast, Labinština is a mining region, or in the Labinonian sense, a Kovar's region. Kovar is Istrian term for a miner, and the term derives from the Italian word for cave or pit, cava which in the Labin dialect is pronounced as kova. The centuries-long history of mining here has been inscribed in every pore of life, and in the not-so-distant past, mining ensured even bare survival. The coal miners here worked until the end of the 1990s, and even though the mines are no longer there, mining is everywhere and echoes like a phantom pain, reverberating in the memory of the area.

This documentary tells us a story about the miners, their identity and values, the stormy past, the enormous sacrifice and the society that mining in this region gave birth to, transcending all ideologies and regimes, socio-political turbulence and overcoming historical oblivion.

2. Sounds Unfrozen

Country: Finland

Category: Documentary

Title: Sounds Unfrozen

Company: YLE/Jean-Claude Kuner

Author: Jean-Claude Kuner

Producer: Jean-Claude Kuner

Director: Jean-Claude Kuner

Sound engineer: Michael Kube

Language: German, French, English

Length: 54:21

Summary

The radio producer looks at his boxes full of tapes and hard disks and suddenly feels like trapped in Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tapefrom the 1950s, which he staged twice in his earlier life as a theatre director - Krapp, the old writer, who comes to terms with his past and his younger self, while listening to old tapes. What can a sound archive contribute to cultural heritage, he wonders? The radio producer embarks on a journey into his own sound archive, which captures sonic memories from different eras frozen on tape and hard disk. In the process, he not only encounters his own younger voice (a voice he has mainly cut out from his pieces), but also relives his past with people he once interviewed (and who also interviewed him) and have long since passed away. But somehow they remain alive in the frozen state of the recordings. Composer John Cage, American folk singer Pete Seeger, or the pianist Grete Sultan, a 95-year-old emigrant from Berlin New York. Through various biographies a history of discrimination and persecution in the twentieth century gradually unfolds and starts interacting with his own biography.

In archives, historical and contemporary, world views condense, collide and overlap. This is where utopias and realities from different eras meet and shape the way we think, act and live in the present. An audio archive in addition can be understood as a network that has the potential to create multiple connections between interdisciplinary fields and different cultures, through sounds, voices, music, and people's personal and professional lives and this in a much more complex exchange of information than a written text ever could.

By unfreezing the sounds from the past from their static state, a new sonic text starts emerging.

3. Thoughtcrime in Belarus. When dystopias come to life.

Country: Germany

Category: Documentary

Title: Gedankenverbrechen in Belarus. Wenn Dystopien lebendig werden.

Title in English: Thoughtcrime in Belarus. When dystopias come to life.

Company: Inga Lizengevic

Author: Inga Lizengevic

Producers: Katrin Moll, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

Director: Inga Lizengevic

Sound engineer: Jean-Boris Szymczak

Other key staff: Editor: Katrin Moll

Language: German

Length: 54:36

Summary

Belarusian state television agitates in hate broadcasts against anyone who does not support ruler Lukashenka. Arrests are arbitrary; torture is carried out in secret. Orwell's dystopia "1984" has become reality in Belarus. "Soon they will climb into our heads and see what thoughts we have. And for these thoughts they will imprison us," says Natalia Dulina, who lost her professorship at the Linguistic University for taking part in protests. Meanwhile, in Belarus, you don't even have to take part in a demonstration - it's enough to toy with the idea. Likes or reposts on social media, laundry in white-red-white on the line: all grounds for arrests and prison sentences. "You are not made president, you are born president," says strongman Lukashenka of himself. In nearly three decades, he has built a system that ensures his autocracy. 2020 could have been a turning point, but after the crushing of peaceful protests, the spiral of repression now continues with renewed vigor. People are arrested and tortured, books are buried, state television has switched to hate programming. Orwell's dystopia - in Belarus it has become reality.

4.  Writing underground - The youth magazine Vedem in Theresienstadt 

Country: Germany

Category: Documentary

Title: Schreiben im Untergrund. Das Jugendmagazin Vedem in Theresienstadt

Title in English: Writing underground - The youth magazine Vedem in Theresienstadt

Company: Radio Bremen (ARD Germany)

Authors: Jakob Schmidt, Jannis Funk

Producer: Jakob Schmidt

Directors: Jakob Schmidt, Jannis Funk

Sound engineers: Jakob Schmidt, Jannis Funk

Other key staff: Editor: Tobias Nagorny (Radio Bremen)

Language: German

Length: 53:30

Summary

In the Terezin Ghetto, 1942, a group of Jewish boys forms a remarkable community: They declare their home an independent "Republic", paint their own flag, and compose their own anthem. While they are forced to work during the day, they are secretly educated in the evenings, when the young teacher Valtr Eisinger tells them about Gandhi and Dostoyevsky, unbeknownst to the SS guarding the ghetto. The boys' courage to face life manifests itself in "Vedem," a weekly magazine edited by 14-year-old Petr Ginz. It contains poems, essays and reports, as well as the latest soccer scores and the joke of the week. Every Friday, they secretly read the most recent texts to one another. And every time a new train leaves for the concentration camps in the East, they hope that no one from the group will be on the list. The one-hour radio documentary features eye witnesses and historians from three different continents, but also brings the boys’ own texts to life, and thus paints a vivid picture of the reality as a child in the Holocaust.

5. Between the Ears: Deep Listening in Japan

Country: Germany/United Kingdom

Category: Documentary

Title: Between the Ears: Deep Listening in Japan

Company: Andreas Hartmann for BBC Radio 3

Author: Andreas Hartmann

Producers: Andreas Hartmann in collaboration with Julia Shimura

Director: Andreas Hartmann

Sound engineer: Michael Kube

Other key staff: Commissioning Editor: Matthew Dodd

Language: Japanese

Length: 29:00

Summary

A sonic journey into Japan's unique culture of music cafés and listening bars. Places where people come together to indulge in deep listening in audiophile quality, with venues for fans of everything from classical, jazz, to electronic music. This culture has its origins in the time prior to the second world war, when imported records and audio equipment were prohibitively expensive. People began to gather in cafés where, for the price of a cup of coffee, they could listen to rare records on the highest quality gramophones. While the traditional classical and jazz cafés are slowly disappearing, there are new modern listening bars emerging, often concentrating on specific genres and even microgenres of contemporary music, with a focus on the same concept of concentrated and collective listening. Rich in binaural recordings, this radio documentary features the owners and regulars of legendary music cafés, like the classical music cafés Violon in Tokyo, and Musik in Kyoto, the jazz café Downbeat in Yokohama, as well as the DJ-Bar Bridge, a cutting-edge listening bar in Shibuya, Tokyo.

6. Queen of Nightclubs

Country: Ireland

Category: Documentary

Title: Queen of Nightclubs

Company: New Normal Culture/Zoë Comyns

Author: Zoë Comyns

Producer: Zoë Comyns

Director: Zoë Comyns

Sound engineer: Zoë Comyns editor and final sound mix by Sean Byrne Tinpot Productions

Other key staff: Commissioning Editor Eoin O'Kelly, Assistant Producer Tess Davidson, Voice of Kate Meyrick Maria Doyle Kennedy,

Language: English

Length: 48:28

Summary

Irishwoman Kate Meyrick was known as the Queen of Nightclubs - she gave 1920s London its roar. This businesswoman and mother of eight opened the most famous nightclubs of London’s Jazz age, went to prison five times and wrote a memoir. This is the first full length documentary of any kind on this Irish woman. No biography exists, just primary sources, including Meyrick's own memoir (1933), and a few modern references reflecting on her life. Through Kate Meyrick’s own words, court reports, newspapers, home secretary files, police surveillance documents, divorce papers and stacks of police reports, presenter and producer Zoë Comyns pieces together the story of Kate Meyrick - London’s Nightclub Queen. Maria Doyle Kennedy voices Meyrick’s memoir 'Secrets of the 43' and through these and interviews with historians, writers and a descendant, the spirit and decadence of the age comes to life. Real contemporary newspaper headlines and reports have been voiced by two actors to give a sense of urgency to the story and Zoë visits key locations in London where Meyrick opened clubs and spent time. Kate Meyrick has been somewhat forgotten in spite of the fact that she made hundreds of newspaper headlines, hosted royalty, famous musicians, the aristocracy, actors and criminals and was involved in the biggest police bribery scandal of the 1920s.

7. You know too much, Van Helsing

Country: Ireland

Category: Documentary

Title: You know too much, Van Helsing

Company: Bernard Clarke

Author: Bernard Clarke

Producer: Bernard Clarke

Director: Bernard Clarke

Sound engineer: Bernard Clarke

Language: English

Length: 59:35

Summary

This is a documentary feature that constantly plays between the lines of documentary and drama. Ostensibly it is concerned with the phenomenon of Dracula, the Bram Stoker character that it seems everyone in the world knows, no matter what colour or creed they be. It traces the author’s roots in Marino, Dublin; his early days in Trinity College, Dublin; and his fateful meeting with the great actor Henry Irving (perhaps the human model for Dracula) at the Shelbourne Hotel, also in Dublin. Then it switches countries, as did Stoker himself, and visits London, England. Along the way it meets various experts on aspects of the phenomenon of Dracula: Veronica Dunne on the technological innovations within the novel; Amanda Harder on the first Dracula’s to make a huge impression in the cinema. It switches continents again and visits radio artist Christian Bulwer in Bremen, Germany to talk about the audio only Dracula and particularly the script for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater on the Air production. It contacts Natasha Robson through Skype in New York, America to hear what she has to say about Hammer films and Dracula; and Frank Keane on the telephone in Paris, France, to talk about Dracula in television -particularly the world of the Munsters and Sesame Street. Finally at a games arcade in Dublin, Ireland things take a turn and the initial play between the worlds of documentary and drama is turned on its head. It seems it has been a gigantic leg pull all along. Or is it?

8. Class of ‘32 - Memories of Nicla Borri

Country: Italy

Category: Documentary

Title: Memorie di Classe ‘32 - L'autobiografia di Nicla Borri

Title in English: Class of ‘32 - Memories of Nicla Borri

Company: Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, Treno della Memoria, Marco Stefanelli

Author(s): Nicla Borri and the Students of the High School “De Franceschi - Pacinotti” Pistoia (Italy)

Producer(s): Marco Stefanelli, Vittoria Moglia, Giovanni Oleandri

Director: Marco Stefanelli

Sound engineer: Marco Stefanelli and the Students of the High School “De Franceschi - Pacinotti” Pistoia (Italy)

Other key staff: Nicla’s Diary Voice: Giulia Gabbanini; Script Editing: Students of the High School “De Franceschi - Pacinotti” Pistoia

Language: Italian, Tuscan dialect, others

Length: 45:36

Summary

“The war, as children see it, is strange… You can’t quite realize what it is exactly. Back then, there was no television that could show you, there was only radio, and it sounded like we were winning!” So begins Nicla Borri’s Memoir, preserved in that treasure chest of diaries, memoirs and epistolaries - all intimate and private writings - which is the National Diaristic Archive of Pieve Santo Stefano, in Tuscany, Italy. These are also the first words read by students from three classes of the De Franceschi-Pacinotti High School in Pistoia, who in Autumn 2023 browsed through the pages written by Nicla. "Class of '32" took shape exactly from this special encounter - that is, between the Borri Memoir and today's girls and boys’ curiosity and imagination - creating a tale able to unravel the sounds and voices of historical archives, as well as the warm and emotional words of today's ninety-one year old Nicla, from the pages of the Memoir. "Class of '32" is a collective work that involved fourty teenagers in a historical sound-investigation around the very harsh years of Second World War, as well as the only apparently better years of the immediate post-war; and that led to a collective reflection on what it means to be a child in times of war, on family bonds, on desire and on how to be there for others.

9. Journey at the Edge of the Night

Country: Slovenia

Category: Documentary

Title: Potovanje na robu noči

Title in English: Journey at the edge of the night

Company: RADIO SLOVENIA

Authors: Mojca Delač, Luka Hvalc, Saška Rakef Perko, Evgen Bavčar

Producers: Mojca Delač, Luka Hvalc, Saška Rakef Perko

Director: Saška Rakef Perko

Sound engineer: Urban Gruden

Language: Slovene

Length: 51:07

Summary

Dr Evgen Bavčar has a special ritual. For over forty years, he has been recording the nightingale singing on May nights in his hometown of Lokavec near Ajdovščina. Under the nocturnal cloak, in duet and in collaboration with the nightingale, the story from Lokavec unfolds into a narrative of the nightingales' blinding so they shall sing in perpetuity - a reflection on blindness as social castration, on existential proximities and distances, the position of the blind throughout time and the question: why should the pleasure of the night not be equal to the pleasure of the day? The nightingale tells Dr Bavčar he is not alone in the dark. But this is not just a story of their coexistence. "When I was recording the nightingale for many years, here and in other places, a friend pointed me to the book Villa San Michele by Axel Munthe (1929). I was taken by the text, I started to listen to nightingales in a completely different way; though I already knew that in some places birds are blinded, either nightingales or other species, to make them think it is always night," says Evgen Bavčar, explaining how he was inspired by this old text and a background to his interest in birds. The night journey to the break of day raises profound questions about human existence, differences, exploitation, the struggle for justice, the environment, freedom and the intimate desire for duality, the Sun, and a new spring.

10. Lights Out - Dust

Country: United Kingdom

Category: Documentary

Title: Lights Out - Dust

Company: Falling Tree Productions

Producer: Eleanor McDowall

Sound engineer: Mike Woolley

Language: English

Length: 27:50

Summary

"I noticed that language seems to fail us. How do you write about the foundations of our existence? That is how mythology enters very naturally into the story, because history is about ideas, religions, empires, wars and culture. Mythology is about the fundaments. Sun, moon, wind, oceans, great floods and tragic gods... We are living in mythological times, where we are shaking the fundaments." - Andri Snær Magnason Drawing on ideas in his book, On Time and Water, the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason and the Scottish artist Katie Paterson explore how the language of mythology can help us hold the moment we live in. From handfuls of dust to watching geological time mark the landscape, this documentary flows from the night skies into the deepest known point in our oceans. Archive recording from Raddir - Voices: Recordings of Folk Songs courtesy of the Árni Magnússon Institute 'Vatnajökull (the sound of)' recording courtesy of Katie Paterson Recording of the journey to Okjökull by Guðni Tómasson Music composed and performed by Phil Smith and Zac Gvi Produced by Eleanor McDowall 'Dust' was originally produced for the BBC Radio 4 documentary series 'Lights Out'