05/10/2023 Mila Teshaieva - Grimme Prize Award
We are very pleased to announce that Mila Teshaieva has been awarded the prestigious Grimme Prize together with Marcus Lenz (Wildfilms)! Together they realised the documentary "Life after Butscha - Trauma and Hope" for WDR, which has now been awarded in the competition category "Information and Culture".
From the jury's statement:
"Mila Teshaieva and Marcus Lenz are on location in Borodyanka, Butscha and Irpin with their camera shortly after the end of the Russian occupation. Right at the beginning of the film, the filmmakers make it clear that they are showing "life afterwards". Within 44 minutes, they provide a highly topical, concentrated, sensitive and multi-layered insight into the region of Ukraine, which has become a worldwide headline due to atrocious violent crimes. They carefully capture what it means to have to administer alleged war crimes and to live everyday lives in the midst of destruction and suffering. (...) Teshaieva and Lenz deserve particular credit for the calm and clarity with which they capture moments and let them speak for themselves. All this happens in the midst of a situation in which it is absolutely unclear - even for the filmmakers - what will happen next. (...) Teshaieva and Lenz succeed in describing the situation, focusing on the people on the ground. They show mass graves, trauma and pain without becoming expository and the distress and excessive demands of the administration to provide clarification, documentation and structure without losing sight of committed local forces. Thus, they published an important contemporary document already in early July 2022, carried by the strength of the images and protagonists."