Since 2004 FOCAL International Awards competition is dedicated to the promotion and celebration of archival footage and its contribution to the creative and cultural industries. We congratulate all the past winners.
Best Use of Footage in a Factual or Natural World Production
The Factual or Natural World Production category includes documentaries or docudramas that deal with current affairs or topical issues, people, events or phenomena. The Factual genre covers a wide array of subjects such as the economy, politics, the environment or natural world, science & technology, natural disasters, climate breakdown, and human-interest stories. Submissions can include feature length productions and series.
2021 Winner
American Murder: The Family Next Door
Director:
Jenny Popplewell
Footage Archive Researcher:
Sarah Powell
Executive Producer:
Jonathan Stadlen
Executive Producer:
James Marsh
Line Producer:
Hayley Ford
Archive Producer:
James RM Hunt
Archival Sources:
Shannan Watts / Rzucek family personal archive, Weld County Police, KMGH Denver 7, KDVR Fox 31, CNN
Production Company:
Knickerbockerglory
Country of Production:
United Kingdom
Synopsis
Told entirely through archival footage this is an immersive and authentic examination of a disintegrating marriage. The focus of the film was to give Shanann Watts a voice to tell her story. She had become overlooked through the years while people focused on her husband to try and understand why this ‘nice guy' snapped. Society can be quick to blame and shame female victims of violent crime. It was important to reveal a layered representation of Shanann and to challenge tired tropes that a bossy woman drove her husband to commit violence.
Shortlisted
Room 2806 – The Accusation
Director:
Mr Jalil Lespert
Producer(s):
Mr Philippe Levasseur
Footage Archive Researcher:
Ms Bronwen Pugsley, Ms Catherine Paoli
Archival Sources:
INA, CNN, AP Archives, AFP Forum, Al Arabiya
Production Company:
CAPA Presse with Le Chaînon Manquant
Country of Production:
France
Synopsis
Room 2806: The Accusation, directed by Jalil Lespert, is a four-episode Netflix docuseries reprising the May 2011 scandal involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), perhaps the most powerful global financial institution, and a prospective candidate for the French presidency.
Strauss-Kahn, a leading figure in the French Socialist Party, was arrested in New York City on May 14, 2011 after Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant and housekeeper at the exclusive Manhattan Sofitel hotel, accused him of sexual assault and attempted rape. Strauss-Kahn was subsequently forced out of his position at the IMF and did not become a candidate in 2012 for the presidential nomination of the Socialist Party, one of the two main bourgeois parties in France.
New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. had Strauss-Kahn removed from an airplane, subjected to the degrading “perp walk,” among other humiliations, indicted and incarcerated in
Spaceship Earth
Director:
Matt Wolf
Producer(s):
Matt Wolf, Stacey Reiss
Footage Archive Researcher:
Brian Becker, Annie Salsich, Tiahoga Ruge - Fellini Films Mexico, Ken Howard
Archival Sources:
John P Allen, The Library of Congress, Abigail Alling, Linda Leigh, A/V Geeks
Production Company:
RadicalMedia
Country of Production:
United States
Synopsis
Spaceship Earth is the true, stranger-than-fiction, adventure of eight visionaries who in 1991 spent two years quarantined inside of a self-engineered replica of Earth’s ecosystem called BIOSPHERE 2. The experiment was a worldwide phenomenon, chronicling daily existence in the face of life threatening ecological disaster and a growing criticism that it was nothing more than a cult. The bizarre story is both a cautionary tale and a hopeful lesson of how a small group of dreamers can potentially reimagine a new world.
Private individual archives (non-exhaustive), Personal archives (non-exhaustive), AFPTV (non-exhaustive), Line Presse (non-exhaustive), French TV channels archives (non-exhaustive)
Production Company:
Le Bureau – Jour2fête
Country of Production:
France
Synopsis
As anger and discontent over social injustices grow, many citizen demonstrations are subject to increasingly violent repression. Un pays qui se tient sage invites citizens to explore, question and confront their views on social order and the legitimacy of the state’s use of violence.
