Anasy documentary contest to focus on youth rights

Abu Dhabi: With the aim of raising public awareness of child and youth rights, school and university students are encouraged to submit a film documentary of at least 28 minutes for the second annual Anasy Documentary Awards (ADA).

Anasy, which in Arabic means bringing together different people and cultures, announced it has opened its doors to UAE residents over 12 years of age to take part in their upcoming ADA.

Submissions started Wednesday and will run until February 10, 2010.

The launching of ADA 2010 will be divided into three main topics, namely: Free topic competition Talk Doc which includes all documentary films that have social, cultural, historical, scientific and sporting subjects, whether documentary, docudrama, TV documentary or cinematic documentary.

The second topic is the Script competition in which script ideas and projects for documentary films that have free topics will be presented and supervised by ADA.

The third is the Child in our eyes topic, which includes documentary films that deal with all topics related to the child as a human being and a vital part of every society.

This session has been launched in partnership with the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) to highlight various concerns, attitudes, visions and viewpoints of youth alongside adults.

Open day sessions

At a press conference held Wednesday to announce the ADA 2010, Dhekra Ouali, ADA director, told Gulf News that open day sessions have been held at 15 universities in the UAE to encourage students to participate in the competition.

"We want to encourage as many students from private and public schools and universities across the UAE to participate in the competition in order to help them advance from the amateur level to a professional one across the UAE and around the Arab world," she said.

A three to four day workshop will be held for students between the ages of 12 and 18 by February 2010 in which students will be introduced to handling cameras and equipment and other post production methods in order to build a documentary film idea and implement it during production.

Introducing different documentary styles and showing the diversity and richness of the different documentary schools in various languages and parts of the world is a main objective for the panel of 10 to 12 judges who will be announcing the winners at the ADA 2010.

One of the main conditions of the competition according to the ADA director is that each film should have a written translation or dubbing in Arabic and English.

Prizes up for grabs

The value of awards of the Anasy Documentary Awards is Dh1.05 million.

A sum of Dh500,000 will be given to the winner of the first award.

Half of this sum will be given in cash and the other half will be in the form of production support in cooperation with twofour54. The categories following the first award are as follows:

The silver award

The bronze award

The best film for the category of Child in our eyes

This is in addition to the following awards:

Best child documentary produced by youth

Best script

Best photography

Best director

Best editingn

Best research

Best character

Best idea/message