From the shadow to the light.
The documentary
Wagner, Putin's shadow army
, won the Grand Prize on Saturday at the 29th international festival of major news reporting and social documentaries (Figra), which was held in Douai, in the north of the France, with over 80 films on the programme.
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Produced after months of investigation by Alexandra Jousset and Ksenia Bolchakova, this documentary was chosen by the jury chaired by the director of news magazines and documentaries of the Moroccan channel 2M, Reda Benjelloun.
This report, which covers the backstage of the Russian private military company Wagner, reputed to be close to the Kremlin and deployed around the Mediterranean and in Africa (before landing more recently in Ukraine), also received the Arnaud Hamelin prize and the of the youth jury.
Investigations on Xinjiang and Iraq awarded
The special jury prize was awarded to
Insecticide - how agrochemicals killed insects
,
by Miyuki Droz Aramaki, Sylvain Lepetit and Sébastien Séga.
China: the Uyghur drama
,
by François Reinhardt, on China's policy in Xinjiang with regard to the Uyghur population, received the Scam prize for investigation.
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The Reporters Without Borders prize was awarded to Jules Giraudat for
Malta, on behalf of Daphné
, a documentary about Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who was murdered in a car bomb attack in 2017. Anne Poiret won the audience prize for her documentary
Enfant of Daesh, the Wretched of War
,
and the Jury's Special Mention was awarded to Joseph Gordillo for
The Law of the Weakest,
about
"Workers' Lawyer"
Ralph Blindauer.
In the less than 40 minutes category, Vincent Nguyen
's The Memory of My Father
, about Alzheimer's disease, received the Grand Prix du Figra.
Iraq, the murdered revolution,
by Amar Al Hameedawi and Jonathan Walsh, received a special mention from the jury.
Sonia Gonzalez for her part received the land(s) of history prize for
Women facing missiles,
a documentary on the occupation in 1981 by women of the British military base of Greenham Common to protest against the storage of American nuclear missiles. .