Category Documentary 2022

1. Australia/ABC
ELISABETH KRÄMER BANNOW: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN NEW IRELAND

Original Title: Elisabeth Krämer Bannow: A portrait of the artist in New Ireland

Author/Producer/Director: Mike Ladd
Sound Engineer: Tom Henry
Other key staff: Marc Anderson
Original language: English
Length: 28'19''

In 2006, director of the South Australian museum Professor Tim Flannery was browsing in an antiquarian bookshop. He found a battered old text, a 1916 publication in German by the now almost forgotten artist and ethnographer Elisabeth Krämer-Bannow. Fascinated, Tim bought the book and asked museum guide Waltraud Schmidt to translate it for him. It emerged that Elisabeth Krämer-Bannow was one of the first European women to explore the South Pacific. In 1908, she accompanied her husband Augustin Krämer to New Ireland, at that time a German colony called Neu Mecklenburg. Her job as the expedition artist was to depict the people, their houses and the local flora and fauna. Although she had a colonial mentality and was not a trained anthropologist, in some ways she was ahead of her time, developing a 'participant observer' technique that is now common in anthropology. Quietly painting in the villages, she gained the trust of the local women and joined them in weaving, gardening, cooking, dancing and other rituals. To tell the story of Elisabeth Krämer-Bannow the documentary uses interviews, readings from her book, letters from Augustin Krämer and 1908 wax cylinder recordings from the original expedition to New Ireland. Along with traditional New Ireland music and new sound compositions by Tom Henry, we also hear binaural nature recordings made in the region by Marc Anderson.

2. Canada/France
ENTRE CHIEN ET LOUP (DIRECTOR'S CUT)

Original title: Entre Chien et Loup

Author/Producer/Director/ Sound Engineer: Neil Sandell
Other key staff: Nicola Lukšić, Editor, CBC “Ideas”, Greg Kelly, Executive Producer, CBC “Ideas”, Nahlah Ayed, CBC presenter, CBC “Ideas”
Special thanks to: Sebastian Dicenaire
Music credits: (CC License) Blue Dot Sessions: “A Palace of Cedars”, “Hickory Interlude”, Podington Bear: “Cracked Nut Suite”, Soularflair: “Even in My Dreams”
Original language: English
Length: 46'20''

An age-old French expression, a dog named Sadie, and a question that reaches deep into the past. These are the points of departure.

Entre chien et loup? The words mean “between dog and wolf”. But the expression means twilight. Poetically, it evokes the tension between the domestic and the wild, between safety and fear. The dog? A long, low, rumpled creature. A wire-haired dachshund. The question: how could Sadie have descended from wolves?

Entre Chien et Loup untangles the mystery of how dogs began. Did we create them? Why was the domestication of dogs so consequential?

In search of clues, archaeologists decode fossils, prehistoric graves, and ancient DNA. These are the old texts that illuminate the past. They call their conclusions a hypothesis. But really, they are just telling us a story. It is one of profound change: from wolf to dog, from predator to scavenger. For prehistoric humans, it marks a turning point in their thinking about animals – not just as wild creatures, to be feared or hunted, but as the first living tools. The domesticated dog signifies a leap of imagination -- a critical stepping stone to the agricultural revolution. Along the way, our treatment of dogs evolves, for better and sometimes, for worse.

The feature begins with a simple scientific question. The answer reveals a foundational event in human evolution. It is no wonder that dogs and wolves are woven into our fables - the big bad wolf - or in our language. Entre chien et loup.

3. Canada/CBC Ideas
SONG OF ZONG!

Original title: Song of Zong!

Author: M. NourbeSe Philip
Producer/Sound Engineer: Tom Howell
Other key staff: Nicola Lukšić (Senior Producer)
Original language: English
Length: 53'59''

In 1781, crew members of the slave ship Zong threw 133 enslaved Africans overboard into the sea. All 133 slaves drowned. The ship’s captain argued that the dumping of human ‘cargo’ was necessary because the ship was running low on drinking water and food.

Tobago-born Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip came across a two-page document - a legal case report -written in 1783, which treated the incident as a matter of insurance law. The question was whether the ship owners should be compensated for their loss of property. Philip locked herself into that 500-word document, and by constraining herself to the words and syllables in the text, she created a poem that brings the stories and sounds of the victims to life. The poem is meant to be read in a group, and when recited it has the effect of hearing the voices of souls lost, as captured by a microphone picking up the ambience of a room.

The poem is based on the 238-year-old court document, and is simultaneously both eerie and beautiful. Producing this kind of disquieting work of art also produces an ethical dilemma. As one commentator puts it: “why make beauty out of misery?” This poem doesn’t answer the question directly, but engages with it, leaving those who hear it marked by the experience.

4. Croatia/HRT, Croatian Radio
ON THE WAY TO VOLOSKO - SOUNDWALK WITH COMPOSER DALIBOR BUKVIĆ

Original title: Prema Voloskom – Šetnjozvuk skladatelja Dalibora Bukvića

Authors/ Directors: Iva Lovrec Štefanović, Lana Deban
Producer: Iva Lovrec Štefanović
Sound Engineer: Lana Deban
Original language: Croatian
Length: 31'00''

The story follows a real walk down the popular Lungomare promenade from Opatija to Volosko with composer Dalibor Bukvić and his music. It presents 50 years old composer in an unusual way – on the way and walking, since it is his well-known passion. This walk down 19th century promenade has always been his favourite during Music Panel, contemporary music festival that was held in Opatija for years. From his student performance in 1992 of the piano piece „Propheties“ to the recent premiere at the same festival in Opatija, the course of Bukvić's artistic opus imposes the reflections of art and life. During the walk, parts of Opatija and Volosko past and present are encountered, and Bukvić's text „Vers le ciel“ (Towards the Sky) from his oratorio „Recits de l'autre monde“ (Stories from Another World) significantly accompanies the walk as a prophecy.

5. Germany/SWR - Südwestrundfunk
THE ASHES OF JOE HILL - THE RESURRECTION OF A LEGEND

Original title: DIE ASCHE VON JOE HILL – Die Rückkehr einer Legende

Authors: Zoran Solomun & Hansi Oostinga
Producer: Wolfram Wessels
Director: Zoran Solomun
Sound Engineers: Toygun Kirali & Angela Raymond
Other key staff: Speakers: Claudia Hübschmann, Oliver Jacobs, Sebastian Mirow, Stefan Roschy, Holger Stolz, Timo Tank
Original language: German / English with German voice over
Length: 54'19''

In 1988, a student makes a curious discovery in the National Archives in Washington. A packet of human ashes. The ashes of Joe Hill, a legendary singer-songwriter and union organiser who founded a lineage of political folk that stretches through Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger to Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen.

Joe Hill was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the most radical trade union in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century. The Wobblies, as they called themselves, were not just trade unionists, but probably the first pop-cultural movement. And Joe Hill was one of their most important voices as a writer, cartoonist and musician.In 1915, he was executed after a staged trial. To honour his last will - and to perpetuate his ideas - his Fellow Workers sent 600 packets of his ashes to like-minded people worldwide. When one of these packets resurfaced more than 70 years later, the IWW wondered what to do with it. Abbie Hoffmann, a well-known fun guerrilla, has an original idea...

6. Germany/WDR - Westdeutscher Rundfunk
EARTH IS A STAR – WE LIVE IN HEAVEN. AN ATTEMPT AT THE FRAGMENTARIAN HANS JÜRGEN VON DER WENSE.

Original title: Die Erde ist ein Stern – wir leben im Himmel. Eine Annäherung an den Fragmentariker Hans Jürgen von der Wense.

Author/Director: Janko Hanushevsky
Producer: Imke Wallefeld
Sound Engineer: Henning Schmitz
Other key staff: Stefko Hanushevsky & Bruno Winzen (actors), Ellen Versteegen (assistant)
Original language: German
Length: 53'50''

Hans Juergen von der Wense (1894-1966) was a composer, writer, translator, meteorologist, geologist, astronomer, a wanderer and a genius fritter.

„One never knows which Wense one should emphasize. The attempt to define Wense is to define his fugitiveness”, says academic Reiner Niehoff. “The sense in me is transformation”, Wense replies on one of the 60.000 manuscript pages that he left behind after his death. 50 of them were published during his life-time. After WW1 Wense hit the Berlin avantgarde-scene with radical compositional gestures. Especially his 5 piano pieces (1915) created attention. Wense’s name was mentioned in the same breath with Satie, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. But when success seemed just within reach, Wense turned his back on the music scene and moved to the Baltic sea where he studied the “Operas and acts of the weather”, the “Oratorios of air”. In reaction to the euro-centristic approaches in philosophy he started translating Chinese philosophy and poetry and indigenous mythology from 100 languages. He invented a language to describe the weather, worked on a catalogue of earthquakes and finally started to systematically walk every day for the next 30 years in order to perceive and describe “a small fragment of this planet”. He kept walking and working on his meandering collection of fragments and papers for the rest of his life without spending a thought on getting published. When he died ill and impoverished the world had long forgotten about him.

7. Germany / BR - Bayerischer Rundfunk
TWO DEGREES COLDER – WHAT THE LITTLE ICE AGE CAN TEACH US ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE TODAY

Original title: Als es zwei Grad kälter wurde – Was die kleine Eiszeit über den Klimawandel heute verrät

Author: Marisa Gierlinger
Producer: Till Ottlitz
Director: Ron Schickler
Sound Engineer: Regine Elbers
Original language: German
Length: 51'28''

Scientists warn that a global increase in temperatures by two degrees Celsius could lead to catastrophe. This radio documentary reminds us that Europeans have faced climate change before. At the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era, temperatures in Europe changed by almost exactly two degrees Celsius – but in the opposite direction. Scientists call this period of extremely cold winters, crop failures and famine the Little Ice Age.

The Augustine monk Wouter Jacobszoon described these hard times in a journal entry from March 1573: “Everything froze solid. There were hail storms, it snowed and the winds blew very roughly.” Jacobszoon also witnessed civil unrest and religious wars: “On my way to Amsterdam I saw the terrible destruction that these troubled times brought.”

Historians believe that the Little Ice Age may have contributed to these civil wars and the monumental societal changes that followed. When ordinary people experienced famine after famine they became disillusioned with traditional authorities like the clergy and the nobility. In this sense, the Little Ice Age did not only lead to suffering and violence but also helped usher in a new era of revolutions, enlightenment and contributed to the development of our modern world. Marisa Gierlinger’s radio documentary brings the Little Ice Age to life citing journals, official documents and religious texts from the era. Historians and climate scientists explain what we can learn from yesterday’s climate change for today.

8. Poland/Radio Lublin S.A.
OUR LULLABY

Original title: NASZA KOŁYSANKA

Author: Kasia Michalak
Producer: Radio Lublin – Feature Department
Director: Kasia Michalak
Sound Engineer: Jarosław Gołofit
Original language: Polish
Length: 29'38''

Ondine is a fair hair nymph living in the rivers and lakes of the North. She can be found in various mythologies. Ondine is an avenger, too. By engaging in a relationship with a mortal man, she loses her divinity. Her beauty passes with time and so does the faithfulness of her lover. The nymph sets a curse on him. He will breathe as long as he is awake, when he falls asleep, his breathing will stop.

“Ondine’s curse” is a common name for a rare genetic disease officially called congenital central hypoventilation syndrome (CCHS). People suffering from CCHS are at risk of death whenever they fall asleep. Every night they need a machine to breathe for them.

One of twelve hundred persons in the world diagnosed with the disease is Leo - the son of a photographer Magda Hueckel and a film director Tomek Śliwiński. They use art to talk about their son’s disease. A few years ago, they made a film and in 2021 they released an extraordinary music album with lullabies, entitled Ondinata. Songs for Ondine.

Kasia Michalak, the author of the feature “Our Lullaby”, visited the family to return to the moments when a double bass player and composer, Sebastian Wypych, had worked on the music for people suffering from Ondine’s curse.

In his works, the musician incorporates the rhythm of the machines helping the patients breathe every night. This very special music serves as a background for the story about rage, sacrifice, and fear. But also about forgiveness and fascination with the Ondine’s myth.

9. Portugal/Sofia Saldanha
THE THUNDERSTORM

Original title: A Trovoada

Author/Producer/Director/Sound Engineer: Sofia Saldanha
Original language: Portuguese
Lenght: 33'15''

Thunderstorms are one of the most unpredictable weather phenomena. When lightning strikes the sky lights up and we hear a rumbling. They are beautiful to watch, but can leave behind a trail of destruction. Thunderstorms trigger human emotions and inspire artists imagination.

This radio documentary tells personal stories about lightning and thunderstorms and reflects on these natural phenomena through its social, artistic and cultural heritage.

With: Ana Dias Neves, Armando Silva, José Rocha, Alexandra Vieira, Maria Bernarda Gomes, Maria da Conceição Lopes, Arminda Amaral, Luís Guerra, João Godinho, Maria Augusta Costa, Irene Lopes, Bruno Gonçalves, Joana Gama e Maria de Fátima Afonso.

10. Serbia/ArtworksAudio, Snežana Ristić & Radonja Leposavić
ZENITH 100 – SHIMMY AT THE LATIN QUARTER CEMETERY

Original title: Zenit 100 - Šimi na groblju latinske četvrti

Authors/Producers/Directors/Sound Engineers: Snežana Ristić & Radonja Leposavić
Original language: Serbian
Length: 17'00''

A hundred years have passed since the launch of Zenith – the first Yugoslav avant-garde magazine whose editor-in-chief was Ljubomir Micić (1895-1971). Zenith was first published in February 1921 in Zagreb. In 1923 Micić transferred it to Belgrade, and in 1926 magazine was banned for allegedly spreading communist propaganda. Almost all of our contemporary authors were at some point associated with Zenith, and Ljubomir Micić was in contact with many European avant-garde leaders and artists, relevant magazines and movements. Despite the controversy it was embroiled in, Zenithism is considered one of the most significant movements in the European historic avant-garde. In the 12th Zenith issue of March 1922, Ljubomir Micić published a script for the Zenithist Radio Film in 17 Pieces – Shimmy at the Latin Quarter Cemetery. This script dating from the time when our country didn’t have a single radio station is an archetype for the audio-collage of the same name.

Narrator in the Shimmy at the Latin Quarter Cemetery feature is Dr Irina Subotić. Contributors from archive recordings include former Zenithists Josip Seissel aka Jo Klek and Mihailo S. Petrov. Clips used in the feature include inserts from documentary-drama radio and television programs by Irina Subotić and Vidosava Golubović, Miloš Jevtić, Dunja Blažević...

11. Slovenia/RTV Slovenia, Radio Slovenia
THE VOICE OF JACKAL

Original title: Glas šakala

Authors: Saška Rakef, Tina Kozin
Producers: Saška Rakef, Alen Jelen, Barbara Hribar
Director: Saška Rakef
Sound Engineers: Bojana Šaljić Podešva (composer), Matjaž Miklič
Other key staff: Pia Brezavšček (dramaturgy), Matjaž Miklič & Martin Florjančič (field recording, sound ambients and effects), Petra Veber, Sebastijan Lamut, M.Sc., Miha Krofel, Sc.D, Tomaž Grušovnik, Ph.D.
Interpretation: Barbara Krajnc Avdić, Vesna Jevnikar, Blaž Šef, Nataša Živković, Aleksander Golja, Ivan Lotrič
Original language: Slovene
Length: 49'41''

The documentary play The Voice of the Jackal is a poetic reflection on the relationship between human culture and non-human species. Through an auditory exploratory approach, it acts on the sensory receptors and refers to man's partial access to the world, which humbles him as a species among species and thus brings him closer to the non-human world. The play, with the concrete case of examining the migration routes of jackals and the conflicts triggered by their growing numbers and territorial expansion – from the time of Maria Theresa to the present day – contextualises the discourse of nature management with the theory of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 1909), who sees non-human living beings as subjects rather than as a Descartesian "machine mechanism", which opens up other possibilities for coexistence. The complex but subtle sum of different discourses and soundscapes captured and composed in the field creates a perspective that takes us beyond the comfort of anthropocentrism. The pioneering thought of biologist Jakob von Uexküll is translated through the radio play into a sensorial language, a physical experience written by sound that also includes the sonority of words. The jackal, here a special species but also a sign of otherness, is seen in a singularity similar to our own. This gives it the power of the voice and positions it in the soundscape – that is dramaturgically subject to the dissolution of the logos – as an equal to the word, with a right to its space.

12. United Kingdom/Falling Tree Productions
A MOTHER TONGUE

Original title: A Mother Tongue

Author: Axel Kacoutié
Producer/Director/Sound Engineer: Axel Kacoutié
Other key staff: Eleanor McDowall (Exec Producer)
Original language: English
Length: 27'30''

What is the etymology of your being?

Axel Kacoutié offers a vivid personal essay reflecting on language, bilingualism and the curated gaps they have to navigate in order to access their culture and sense of self. “Your language is a spell, an invocation speaking you into existence, rediscovering the contours of your morality, the fabric of your race and gender and how you relate to others and the world…” Featuring the voices of the poet Raymond Antrobus and performance artist Rachel Cheung, Axel weaves together the thoughts of a number of multilingual people - including Derick Armah, Irina Niculescu, Mauricio Loseto, Olivia Melkonian, Radhika Viswanathan and Rosel Jackson Stern - into a reflection on living between languages and finding yourself in the gaps.

13. Wales/BBC Wales Network Radio
THE MEDIEVAL FEMINIST

Original title: The Medieval Feminist

Producer: Alice McKee
Director: Alice McKee
Sound Engineer: Mike Evans
Other key staff: Carys Eleri (presenter)
Original language: English
Length: 27'30''

Writer and comedian Carys Eleri reignites a centuries old creative beef, exploring the hilarious, erotic and whip-smart poetry of Gwerful Mechain. Dafydd ap Gwilym was regarded as one of the greatest Welsh bards of the Middle Ages but is probably best known for writing an Ode to the Penis in the 14th century. However, few know the name Gwerful Mechain, who just one century later penned a Poem to the Vagina. Carys Eleri wants to find out why. Gwerful is the only female Welsh medieval poet whose work has survived - but until very recently her writing was suppressed by male scholars who disapproved of her enthusiastic tendency towards the indecent. Katie Gramich, who recently published the first complete translation of Gwerful’s surviving works, tells Carys about Gwerful’s talent for "dyfalu" - concocting ingeniously bizarre metaphors - and her habit of writing incendiary rebuttals to her male contemporaries. To find out why sparring inspires creativity, Carys talks to rapper Nadia Rose about growing up on the battle rap scene. Carys first stumbled upon Gwerful when her friend, historian Sara Huws, posted an ASMR video of her reading Poem to the Vagina on Instagram. Carys and Sara chat about rediscovering and relating to Gwerful today.

Throughout the programme, the poetic battles of Gwerful and her contemporaries break out of the dusty archives and are brought to life with shockingly rude dramatic readings by Alexandria Riley and Geraint Rhys Edwards.

14. Wales/BBC Wales Network Radio
BETWEEN THE EARS: RHYTHMS OF REMEMBERING

Original title: Between the Ears: Rhythms of Remembering

Producer: Megan Jones
Director: Martin Smith
Sound Engineer: Cathy Robinson
Other key staff: Georgia Ruth (composer)
Original language: English
Length: 28'40''

A radiophonic exploration of The Gododdin, a lament for the fallen, bringing to life one of the oldest treasures of European literature. The Gododdin occupies a unique place in the literature of the UK. The oldest Welsh poem - a battle elegy from around 600AD - it was passed down orally, possibly in the form of song, for hundreds of years. Written down by two scribes in the 13th century in a form of proto-Welsh – Brythonic - the events commemorated are real, but took place before Wales and England even existed, and long before there was such a thing as the English language. The Gododdin were a tribe based south of present day Edinburgh, who, as Brittania was reshaping itself in the post-Roman era, were fighting off incursions of Anglo-Saxons from the east. The site of the battle is near Catterick. And we know that the poem was composed by Aneirin, who must have been present at the battle. He recorded what he witnessed in a series of 100 elegies for the fallen.

This programme enters into the world of The Gododdin, weaving extracts of Gillian Clarke's new English translation of the poem with an immersive soundscape and music. Her translation of Aneirin's words - the first complete one by a poet - read by Lisa Jen Brown, provide the backbone of the programme, and the poem's history and resonance today is explored through interviews with Gillian, theatre director Mike Pearson, and Ieuan Jenkins, who recalls his experience of serving as a young soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan.