Time Out Best City award for People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am – Boris Gerrets

What would it be like, to enter into the life of a complete stranger? The film evolved from two chance encounters in the streets of London. Its protagonists are Sandrine, an attractive young woman from Brazil on a mission to find a husband, Steve, a seasoned beggar, whose life is a continuous struggle with drug addiction and Precious, a poet who became Steve’s girlfriend. Originally begun as a documentary project, the film soon developed its own distinct dynamic where the borders between fact and fiction became blurred. There is a sense that the closer he gets to his subjects, the more the obstruction of his camera seemed to distance him from them. Yet ultimately, and perhaps unexpectedly, People… reveals a personal, humane and fragile space that only came into existence precisely because it had been filmed.

Grand Jury Special Mention for Katka by Helena Treštíková

“You bet on someone in the beginning of the process and then you wait and see what life does with them.” This is how Czech director Helena Trestikova explains her long-term documentaries. Following on from the European Film Academy Award winning Rene (2008), Trestikova brings us Katka – 14 years in the life of a drug addict. Katka is an extraordinarily raw and uncensored character portrait of a troubled young woman living on the edge of human existence, desperately searching for love and salvation. Will she find it in the rehab? Will she find it in the arms of the man she loves? Or in the first cry of her long-desired baby? Tagging along with her through the back streets and squalors of Prague, Trestikova gets deep under the skin of a person most of us would cross the road to avoid, and shows us Katka’s profoundly human face. You might be angry with Katka, or your heart may go out to her. One thing is certain – you will not forget her.