About the Award
The WITNESS Award in Memory of Joey R.B. Lozano will be awarded to the qualifying SILVERDOCS filmmaker of a feature-length film who has produced a well-crafted and compelling documentary about a human rights violation or social justice issue. The winning filmmaker will also have a thoughtful, creative, and feasible outreach plan to use their film as a tool to raise awareness of the human rights or social justice issue explored in the film with a goal to bring about change. This year’s festival marks the inaugural year for the WITNESS Award at SILVERDOCS.

This $5,000 (US) award is to be used by the winning filmmaker towards implementing an outreach and distribution plan for their film that will aim to educate and activate people around the issues that it raises.

About Joey Lozano
Joey R.B. Lozano was a respected independent human rights activist in the Philippines and one the country's leading investigative reporters. He covered indigenous peoples' rights and the environment, considered the two most dangerous beats in the Philippines. Joey was a WITNESS partner and board member. He co-produced many films and collaborated on others that helped raise awareness about threats to indigenous people’s rights in the Philippines from corporations, and the complicity of the government in the abuses. Watch one of the films, The Rule of the Gun in Sugarland online here. He was also one of the main subjects of the 2002 documentary “Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News” by Kat Cizek and Peter Wintonick. Joey passed away in November 2005. His passion and commitment were an inspiration to everyone who knew him.

The 2009 Finalists for the WITNESS Award are:

ANOTHER PLANET

DIRECTOR: Ferenc Moldoványi

SYNOPSIS: Expanding upon themes he explored in Children: Kosovo 2000 (SDFF 24), Ferenc Moldoványi’s latest documentary is at once hypnotically beautiful and acutely disturbing. Shot over a two-year period in four countries on four continents—Ecuador (South America), Mexico (North America), Democratic Republic of Congo (Africa),and Cambodia (Asia)—Another Planet unfolds as a cinematic tone poem in the tradition of Koyaanisqatsi, exposing the unequal distribution of wealth around the world as a major humanitarian crisis. Throughout this journey, Moldoványi’s unwavering vision reminds us of the eternal coexistence of beauty and horror all over the world. Another Planet crosses cultural boundaries to forge a commentary on the human condition as damning as it is open-ended.

CRUDE

DIRECTOR: Joe Berlinger

SYNOPSIS: Three years in the making, this cinéma-vérité feature from acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) is the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet. An inside look at the infamous $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” case, Crude is a reallife high stakes legal drama set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking as it examines a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.

GOOD FORTUNE

DIRECTOR: Landon Van Soest

SYNOPSIS: The West has spent $2.3 trillion in charitable aid over the last 50 years but has failed to significantly reduce poverty levels in Africa. In fact, many of our best intentions have actually undermined the communities they aimed to benefit. GOOD FORTUNE presents a unique opportunity to experience foreign aid through the lens of the people it is intended to help. Shot over three years across Kenya’s diverse landscapes, the film interweaves intimate portraits of three individuals targeted by massive international development projects. Jackson, Silva, and Okech fight against the odds as they confront the development projects that are threatening to destroy their homes and livelihoods. In the rural countryside, Jackson’s farm is being flooded by an American investor who hopes to alleviate poverty by creating a multi-million dollar rice farm. On neighboring Lake Victoria, Oketch battles World Bank environmental policies that are making it nearly impossible for him to survive as a fisherman. And in Nairobi, Silva’s home and business in Africa’s largest squatter community are being demolished as part of a United Nations slum-upgrading project. Interweaving meditative portraits of its characters, GOOD FORTUNE examines the impact of international aid on the ground, according to those it is intended to benefit. With a broad scope and intimate style, the film portrays surprising stories of human perseverance and suggests that the answers for Africa lie in the resilience of its people.

MRS. GOUNDO’S DAUGHTER

DIRECTORs: Barbara Attie & Janet Goldwater

SYNOPSIS: MRS. GOUNDO’S DAUGHTER is the story of a West African mother’s fight for asylum in the U.S. to protect her two-year old daughter from female genital cutting. Shot in Philadelphia and Mali, the film explores the African tradition of female genital cutting, which dates back thousands of years, as well as the intricacies and frustrations of the asylum process. Goundo’s husband fled ethnic conflict in Mali nineteen years ago. Goundo came to the United States in 1999. Together, they are raising three young children in Philadelphia, PA. To stay in the U.S., Goundo must persuade an immigration judge that her two-year old, U.S. born daughter, Djenabou, will almost certainly suffer clitoral excision if Goundo is deported. In Mali, where more than 85% of women and girls are excised, Goundo and her husband are convinced they would be powerless to protect their daughter from her grandparents, who believe all girls should be excised. The film bridges Goundo’s two worlds. In a Malian village, we see sixty-two girls preparing to be excised just as their mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers were. Half way around the world, in Philadelphia, we hear Goundo's friends from West Africa tell how, even though they were excised, they are determined to save their daughters from the pain and sometimes horrific health consequences of genital cutting. In MRS. GOUNDO’S DAUGHTER we join her friends’ and family’s anxious vigil as they await the outcome of her asylum hearing.

MY NEIGHBOR, MY KILLER

DIRECTOR: Anne Aghion

SYNOPSIS: Anne Aghion has spent over a decade documenting a small village in Rwanda where, since 1999, government trials called the Gacaca have attempted to move toward reconciliation and healing in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where Hutus killed Tutsis on a mass scale using machetes and makeshift weapons. The Gacaca are open-air trials; perpetrators of the genocide are released from jail and move back to the neighborhoods where family members of their victims still live. Here, citizen judges try their cases and the women whose families have been destroyed are asked to find forgiveness for the murderers. Aghion punctuates her devastating narratives of recrimination and forgiveness with audio from local radio broadcasts and shots of the beautiful local landscape, which too easily covers over the traces of unspeakable crimes. The film’s unflinching eye carefully captures the resentment of many of the women, skeptical that these trials will lead to real justice and tired of hearing the denials of their killers. Nonetheless, when in an unbearably moving scene Aghion films a woman who commutes the sentence of the man who murdered her children and family, we confront evidence of an unfathomable capacity for human forgiveness. Aghion provides no easy answers, but the strength of this woman and that of many of the others interviewed in the film provides a glimmer of hope that, 15 years later, Rwanda is slowly seeing past the horrors of the genocide.

OUR FORBIDDEN PLACES

DIRECTOR: Leila Kalani

SYNOPSIS: In 2004, the King of Morocco set up a Commission for Reconciliation Equity destined to investigate State violence during the ’years of lead.’ Over three years the film accompanies four families in their quest for elucidation. Everyone faces up to this imperative all of a sudden: to make memories come back, to say what has been walled in silence, to understand the enigmas, to seize the destiny of the eldest, their promise, one’s own. To mourn those who have disappeared, to also mourn one’s own ruined existence. The experience spares no pain, for each secret uncovered reveals another, and in this chain of losses, it is the family and its ties, its temporary legends and its comforts, which risk collapse. The possibility of speech doesn’t signify its fluidity, and it is the painful progress of a re-appropriation of a buried language that one is helping with. From politic to domestic, intertwined by strength then, resolved today at the public square, the film shows fates none of which is unharmed from the inheritance of History.