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FIFDH GENEVA 2021 FIFDH Industry

72 Hours wins the 2021 FIFDH Impact Day Award

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- The film project by Belarusian filmmaker Anna Savchenko has received the €15,000 prize at the record-breaking industry event, which ran entirely online

72 Hours wins the 2021 FIFDH Impact Day Award
Anna Savchenko, whose debut feature documentary project 72 Hours won the Impact Day Award

The third edition of Impact Day, the Industry programme of Geneva’s International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH), was held entirely online and despite the challenges of this endeavour, more than 850 people hailing from more than 70 countries attended its webinars, setting a record of attendance. The Impact Day programme featured five days of online activities, including two public webinars with 12 speakers in total, a 3-part Impact Lab and around 100 pre-arranged 1-on-1 meetings.

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Laura Longobardi, head of Impact Day, underlined: “It’s been amazing to see so many filmmakers around the world with a growing ambition of using their films as tools for change. We’re so glad we’ve been able to expand more than ever this space of exchange and learning, so much needed in these difficult times.”

The 2021 FIFDH Impact Day Award was bestowed upon the project 72 Hours by Anna Savchenko. The film portrays the story of a mother whose life has been incomplete ever since her son was wrongfully accused, sentenced to death and executed within a year. By sharing her story, she goes from being a grieving mother to a symbol of the fight against the death penalty in Belarus. The project is produced by Isabel de la Serna for the Brussels-based Playtime Films, in co-production with SaNoSi Productions (France) and Volia Films (Estonia). The Impact Day Award consists of an €15,000 impact strategic package provided by UK’s Think-Film Impact Production, a market-leading company with specialist expertise at the cutting-edge intersection of film and policy. They will work with the winning project to develop a comprehensive impact roadmap that harnesses the film’s impact vision and delivers measurable impact outcomes.

This year, 16 documentary projects participated at the Impact Day (read the news), and with the help of five experienced tutors, were guided through the Impact Lab where through training the filmmakers refined the ambitions and goals they have for their films, and identified the organisations they could partner with. At the end of this training, the projects’ teams met with changemakers in meetings strategically curated by the Impact Day team. In total, 94 curated meetings were arranged between 65 participants from 36 organisations and the 16 projects teams, spread across 24 cities in 20 countries and in 10 different time zones. The winner of the Impact Award was selected based on the votes that the changemakers gave to each project, judging each project’s potential to produce a positive impact.

Furthermore, the participants explored more ways to raise funds for their campaigns thanks to a partnership with the StoryBoard Collective, a recently launched initiative from the Geneva-based Foundation. On top of that, the collective will be offering matching grants for funding raised through collaborations initiated at the Impact Day, given certain conditions.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that this year’s FIFDH Creative Documentary Grand Prize Winner Shadow Game by Eefje Blankevoort and Els Van Driel (read the news), has won last year’s edition of the Impact Day, which allowed the team to develop an impact campaign which they launched during the festival. The campaign is a call to action to protect unaccompanied children on the move and to put pressure on European institutions to change their policy. Find more information on their recently launched website here

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