Shoghakat Vardanyan's documentary 1489, which chronicles the Armenian director's search for her missing soldier brother, has won the best film award in international competition at The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).
The title 1489 refers to the anonymous number of a “body of an individual missing in action,” and was the number assigned to Soghomon Vardanyan, a 21-year-old student and musician who was close to completing his military service when the conflict between Azerbaijan and his home country Armenia over Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) flared up again in September 2020.
On the seventh day of the war, Soghomon went missing. Using her phone camera, his sister Shoghakat films her and her parents’ search and their emotional process. 1489 also won the Firpesci Award at IDFA.
The IDFA jury described the film as “ultimately, an unforgettable example of cinema as an act of love,” calling it a “piercing light that makes visible the vast hidden interior landscape of grief and creates a tangible presence from unbearable absence.”
Elsewhere in the international competition, the IDFA Award for Best Directing went to Mohamed Jabaly’s Norway-Palestine co-production Life Is Beautiful, which chronicles how the Palestinian director became trapped while on an exchange in Norway when the borders of his home Gaza were closed for an unspecified period in 2014.
The judges called the film “a timely cinematic expression of the universal need to be recognized in our full humanity” with a “directorial tone that, almost impossibly, manages to find hope and humor amid unimaginable pain.”
Meanwhile, the IDFA Award for Best Film in the Envision Competition went to Brazilian film Canuto’s Transformation by Ariel Kuaray Ortega and Ernesto de Carvalho, set within the indigenous Mbyá-Guaraní community,
The Award for Best Directing in the Envision Competition went to Kumjana Novakova for Silence of Reason from North Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
