Short Abstract:

Anthropologist and acclaimed director Mantas Kvedaravičius was a member of our association. The Award provides an occasion for our community to affirm our values and recognize Mantas's intellectual, political and artistic legacy of courage and love.

Long Abstract:

The Mantas Kvedaravičius prize distinguishes a medium or long feature documentary that is remarkable by its cinematographic anthropological and engaged dimensions, and as such, in the wake of Mantas Kvedaravičius's path in research, creation and action. Mantas Kvedaravičius's approach was that of a documentary tradition with strong narrative construction and storytelling, close to the visual codes and grammar of feature films (he is also the director of feature films Prologos and Partenonas that premiered in venice in 2019).

Mantas Kvedaravičius's cinema was ethnographic in the sense that it resulted from long-term engagement on the field, and explored ethnographic questions such as memory, lived experiences of violence, temporality, the everyday of conflicts, etc. His work on dangerous and sensitive fields was in touch with burning political and social issues, and recognized as an important contribution to the advancement of human rights. However, his visual research was clearly distinct from 'investigative' approaches: it was attached to a poetry of images (minute attention to light, long shots, slowness, sensitive dimension focusing on the texture of things and beings through a work of image and sound). In this sense, Kvedaravičius's cinema was not about denouncing but capturing the everyday and profound experience of conflicts on our social bodies, through the visible and the invisible.