Documentary Category

GRAND PRIX MARULIĆ AWARD: Croatia/HRT - The Day I Shall Not Forget for the Rest of my Life

The feature titled “The Day I Shall Not Forget For The Rest Of My Life” is the story of Carpathia, the ship best known for heading into the precarious rescue of people from the Titanic on April 15, 1912. It is also the story of all of these people - officers, sailors and passengers, participants of this event that forever marked their lives. The feature follows the chronology of Carpathia's sailing history, focusing on the tragic and heroic moments that took the two ships into eternity. An authentic testimony of these events is brought to us through the diary of Marija Aliuš Bartowski, a teacher from Osijek who wrote this extraordinary biography after finding herself on the Carpathia traveling from New York to Rijeka that day. Her diary entries take us back into the midst of the dramatic scenes of the shipwreck rescue, but also portray a charismatic woman who left behind an extremely private and historical document. Until now, this diary has never been presented to the public in this form. While exploring the story, we additionally found some artifacts unknown to the public, stored in museum archives and collections that reveal important and interesting details from the past. Also, ship Carpathia, connected the second largest port of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Rijeka and the largest port of the New World, New York. Many individuals and families, of different ethnic backgrounds and social status traveled by this ship, with hopes of a better life.

ORIGINAL TITLE: Dan kojega neću za cijeli život zaboraviti

AUTHOR: Đino Đivanović

PRODUCER: Nikica Klobučar

SOUND ENGINEER: Srđan Nogić

MUSIC COMPOSER: Maro Market

OTHER KEY STAFF: Mia Anočić (Actress)

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE: Croatian and English

DURATION: 46:07

2. Canada / Rebecca Nolan (Windswept Radio Inc.) - The Pear Tree

My documentary is about a man, a pear tree and a village that was erased off the map in 1974. Dr. Elias Bartellas grew up in a small village on the island of Cyprus. The son of farmers, he tended the soil and sold fruit door to door with his brothers.

When he came of age he left to go to school in a foreign country. Not long after Turkish troops invaded his homeland and divided the island in half. His village was seized by the Turks as a military headquarters. And he was never truly able to return.

In search of a home Elias moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland in Canada. It was there that he studied medicine and became a doctor. He delivered the children of thousands of Newfoundlanders, but was still treated with suspicion as an immigrant. In an attempt to reconnect with his homeland, he planted a pear tree. He coxed life out of the rocky and inhospitable soil. A place where pear trees had never grown before. On a cliff alongside the North Atlantic.

After years of nurturing, Elias is finally able to harvest pears from this tree. As he eats them he is in a sense transported back to his village in Cyprus. He relives his childhood in the house and mourns what he has lost.

ORIGINAL TITLE: The Pear Tree

AUTHOR / PRODUCER / DIRECTOR / SOUND ENGINEER: Rebecca Nolan

OTHER KEY STUFF: Chris Brookes, Dave Panting

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE: English

DURATION: 15:16

3. UK / Sarah Cuddon/Falling Tree Productions - The Wind Phone

On a hill in Northern Japan an unusual phone booth has become a shrine and gathering place for people to speak to loved ones. Guided by Miwako Ozawa, we made a special journey to find it. When an earthquake and Tsunami struck Japan in 2011, thirty-foot waves obliterated coastal communities. Itaru Sasaki, a local resident and Buddhist gardener, was already grieving his cousin when the Tsunami hit. In Japan, Confucius and Buddhist customs and teachings emphasize the importance of filial piety and family loyalty. Most households have a small Buddhist altar where daily rice bowls are offered to ancestors. In his grief, desperate to create a living memorial where he could connect with his cousin, Itaru had the idea of nestling an old phone booth on the windy hill at the bottom of his garden. This would be a place he could go to speak to his cousin, a place where his words could be ‘carried on the wind.’ He called it his Wind Phone.

In the aftermath of the Tsunami, word of the phone spread. Itaru opened up his garden to anyone who wanted to visit the Wind Phone. It was hard to find the booth, hidden away up in the hills above Otsuchi. But once people had, a process of healing would begin. For this programme we too made the journey to the Wind Phone. In the sanctuary of the booth we met those who had sometimes come from miles away to dial old never-to-be-forgotten phone numbers and allow their love and loss to be carried by the wind.

ORIGINAL TITLE: The Wind Phone

PRODUCER: Sarah Cuddon

SOUND ENGINEER: Mike Woolley

OTHER KEY STAFF: Alan Hall (Executive Producer), Miwako Ozawa (Narrator)

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE: Japanese, English

DURATION: 26:29

Drama Category

GRAND PRIX MARULIĆ AWARD: Austria / ORF – Woyzeck

"Woyzeck" is one of the most influential and, in this sense, most important dramas in German-language literature. Georg Büchner began to write Woyzeck in 1836, at the same time as his comedy, or shall we better say his political satire "Leonce and Lena", but his Woyzeck remained a fragment, because Büchner died in 1837 at the age of only 23.

Woyzeck is a social drama. Franz Woyzeck is a simple soldier who is physically and psychologically exploited and humiliated by his environment. His captain tortures Woyzeck with moral accusations, Marie, his lover, cheats on him with a drum major, the leader of a marching band, and Franz Woyzeck is abused by a doctor as a medical experiment subject.

Also because Büchner's drama was so radical in content, it was not brought to the stage until the 20th century.

In Woyzeck, Büchner shows how social conditions can deform a person. Woyzeck is sensitive: too much, one might say, because after all, he believes he is hearing inner voices ordering him to kill his unfaithful girlfriend. When Woyzeck is defeated by the drum major in a wrestling match, he gives up: he gives away his belongings and stabs Marie on the shore of a lake ...

Georg Büchner transforms the story of Woyzeck, who became a murderer, into a literary figure to the core and to the extreme, "shattered by fever to the point of orthography," as Heiner Müller put it. The world, even his beloved Marie, presents itself to the thrown man, the man who has been maltreated by society, as - as the text says - "overturned harbour".

In his radio drama version, the experienced theatre and radio drama director and sound designer Stefan Weber shows Büchner's Woyzeck as an empty, post-apocalyptic world.

ORIGINAL TITLE: Woyzeck

AUTHOR: Georg Büchner

PRODUCER / DIRECTOR / SOUND ENGINEER: Stefan Weber

OTHER KEY STAFF: Markus Meyer, Katrin Thurm, W.Hübsch

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE: German

DURATION: 56:12

2. UK / BBC Radio Drama North - This Changeling Self

The festival was always a place she liked to wonder. She could be there in full view and no-one thought she was more than a performer. She could catch people out; half-drunk some of them would do anything, go anywhere. And she took them. She used it as a time to cross over, let them have some of the songs she kept, some of the stories she knew. But this man, this one she wanted to keep.

'This Changeling Self' by Linda Marshall Griffiths is a magical story of love and loss recorded on location at the Edinburgh Festival inspired by the Scottish myth and ballad 'Tamlin and the Fairy Queen'. Directed by Nadia Molinari with sound design by Steve Brooke. Performed by Christine Bottomley, Sacha Dhawan, Rupert Hill and Kay McAllister.

ORIGINAL TITLE: This Changeling Self

AUTHOR: Linda Marshall Griffiths

PRODUCER: Nadia Molinari

DIRECTOR: Nadia Molinari

SOUND ENGINEER: Steve Brooke

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE: English

DURATION: 43:40

3. Czech Republic / Czech Radio – Virtuoso

Virtuoso is an original radio drama by Romanian playwright and director Ilinca Stihi commissioned by Czech Radio and directed by her in Prague (not only in studios but also on location). She was inspired by Gérard de Nerval's Aurelia. “He wrote this poetic novella in 1855 before committing suicide. The manuscript was found in his pocket,” says Ilinca Stihi about her source of inspiration.

The surreal story happens in the main character’s head and concerns the deepest tragedy of the human personality, i.e. its disintegration in death. “We watch the character’s last moments before he dies with his dangerous memories and perceptions which pervade and flood his mind. Real events and fictitious moments blend into one stream absorbing everything,” specifies Ilinca Stihi. An important part of her work, which is colourful in terms of sound, is Max Bruch’s music, which accompanies the listener all the time. Aurelia herself is, according to Stihi, “a number of ways of female presence in the male character’s life. She has different faces but all of them have the same power of enchantment and seduction. They resemble witches pushing men deeper and deeper into the emptiness of death.”

ORIGINAL TITLE: Virtuoso

AUTHOR: Ilinca Stihi

PRODUCER: Kateřina Rathouská

SOUND ENGINEERS: Tomáš Pernický, Jan Trojan

OTHER KEY STAFF: Dana Reichová, Eva Vovesná, Jiří Našinec

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE: Czech

DURATION: 50:03

Short Forms Category

GRAND PRIX MARULIĆ AWARD: Ireland / RTÉ lyric fm – Correspondences

Correspondances is a loose adaptation of Charles Baudelaire’s poem (Les Fleurs du mal, 1857) updated to the 21st century and immanent climate catastrophe. The piece follows the general outlines of the poem and seizes on concepts, ideas and images within it; though there are departures from the text in hommages to Baudelaire’s successors –especially Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Apollinaire.

Baudelaire had no knowledge of the climate apocalypse, but he did document humanities oscillations between the world of nature and artificial paradises (narcotics); and an Edenic childhood full of the natural world, with the modern depravity of the city.

The correspondences here are the natural world and the simulated one (the world of digital technologies in computers and smartphones); the jungles and forests and the modern metropolis –the world on fire.

ORIGINAL TITLE: Correspondences

AUTHOR: Charles Baudelaire

PRODUCERS: Aodán Ó’Dubhghaill, Bernard Clarke

DIRECTOR: Bernard Clarke

SOUND ENGINEER: Bernard Clarke

OTHER KEY STAFF: Liz Nolan

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE: French

DURATION: 10:00

2. Portugal / Sofia Saldanha (for Radio Atlas) - The Box

For years Angelina kept a box. While the box itself was made of ordinary cardboard, the contents inside made it extraordinary: locks of hair, holy saints, a photograph and an obituary. Her dying wish was to be buried with it. Angelina born in 1917 passed away in September 2010. A few months later while looking through Angelina’s bedroom I stumbled upon a burden: the old box that she wanted to spend the afterlife with. Why was it still there?

The Box tells an intimate story about loss and memory: my memories entangled with my grandmother’s memories. It also evokes the sounds of a countryside family house built in 1861 and features sounds of a recovered building in Lisbon built after the 1755 earthquake. Both trigger memories of places we have known intimately. Places we will never see again, sounds we will never hear again, and also people who have crossed our paths that we will no longer see, but who still lurk in our emotional memory.

ORIGINAL TITLE: A Caixa

AUTHOR / PRODUCER 7 DIRECTOR: Sofia Saldanha

SOUND ENGINEER: Sofia Saldanha

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE: Portugese

DURATION: 7:00

3. Canada / France / Neil Sandell - The Collector

Camille Saint-Saens was an old man when he wrote “Clarinet Sonata in E-flat major”. It was his second last composition before he died. Born in 1835, Saint-Saens was a giant of French music in the 19th century. But by the early 20th century, his music had fallen out of fashion. He was yesterday’s man. He died on a distant shore in Algiers. At the end of his life he chose to write a piece for the clarinet - an instrument often likened to the human voice.

“The Collector” takes Saint-Saens’ clarinet sonata as its point of departure. The music’s shifting moods –playful, wistful, melancholy – move the author to contemplate the autumn of his own life.

He has moved to France, a distant shore, where he finds himself isolated. Language is a barrier. Conversation is difficult. His world has grown quiet. For solace he listens to the recorded voices he has collected over the years. Some he treasures for the way they sound, some for their memories. As a radio producer, he has spent a half a lifetime listening closely to human voice – not just to what people say, but to how they say it – their sighs, their hesitations, and their laughter.

“The Collector” weaves fragments of speech and a personal story into the fabric of Saint-Saens’ clarinet sonata. It elaborates the music into a meditation on aging, isolation, and the comforts of the human voice.

ORIGINAL TITLE: The Collector

AUTHOR / PRODUCER / DIRECTOR: Neil Sandell

SOUND ENGINEER: Neil Sandell

MUSIC CREDIT: André Moisan, clarinet; Louise-Andrée Baril, piano from the album “Impressions de France”. Used with the permission of ATMA Classique

ORIGINAL LANGUAGE: English

DURATION: 6:58

Congratulations to all of our winners!