The Doc Alliance Award for Best Feature Film, endowed with 5,000 EUR, was presented to “The Shards” (‘Oskolky’, Georgia/Germany) by Masha Chernaya. The film was selected by Doclisboa, where it won the City of Lisbon Award in the 2024 edition “In spring 2022, Masha prepares to leave her homeland, Russia. What follows is a series of unexpected goodbyes: her mother dies of cancer, her partner escapes military conscription, and everything — including her former self — begins to fall apart. As a way to process her grief, she turns to her camera, capturing everything”, the synopsis reads.
The jury praised the film “for its unique cinematic qualities” and honoured its “cinematic language that is quiet, resistant to classic narrative structures, and develops a striking ability to merge personal and collective mourning.”
The Doc Alliance Award for Best Short Film, endowed with 3,000 EUR, went to “We Had Fun Yesterday” (Belgium) by Marion Guillard. In her film, the director reflects on her relationship with herself and her body, her distance from conventional ideals of femininity, and unsettling encounters with men — an autobiographical exploration intertwined with reflections on how we perceive others: animals, whether wild or caged; nature, whether untouched or shaped by human intervention.
The jury described the film as “an honest and beautifully crafted work that creates a tender rhythm through its layering of image and voiceover. Marion Guillard pulls us into her imagery and stream of consciousness, through a narrative (full of surprises,) interweaving personal quests of identity and family relations with views of being a filmmaker.“
The winning films were selected by a jury of three distinguished film professionals: Fernando Ganzo (Deputy Editor-in-Chief at Cahiers du Cinéma), Caroline Kirberg (CEO of pong film) and Gerald Weber (Deputy Managing Director at sixpackfilm). The awards were presented by Alessandra Luchetti, Head of Department and Deputy Director at EACEA (Creative Europe – MEDIA).
A curated selection of the nominated films — including the four 2025 nominees “Grey Zone,” “Shuruuk,” “23:23,” and “Bamssi” — is now available to stream online on DAfilms.com.
The Doc Alliance network of documentary film festivals supports emerging talent in European documentary cinema. Each of the seven member festivals — CPH:DOX, Doclisboa, DOK Leipzig, FIDMarseille, Ji.hlava IDFF, Millennium Docs Against Gravity FF, and Visions du Réel — as well as guest festival Punto de Vista, nominated one short and one feature-length documentary from their recent programmes. Each festival will showcase at least three films from the Doc Alliance Award selection in its next edition.
