Jury 2020
Christine Cynn, Film director/producer (The Act of Killing), Production company: Ice-9 in Tromsø
Holger Pötzsch, Associate professor in Media and Documentation Studies, Dept. of Language and Culture, UiT.
Heidi Alexandra Darvell, student, Master Program in Peace and conflict Transformation, Centre for Peace Studies, UiT
Made in Bangladesh
France/Bangladesh/Danmark/Portugal 2019
Producer: François d'Artemare, Ashique Mostafa
Director: Rubaiyat Hossain
Screenplay: Rubaiyat Hossain, Philippe Barrière
Photography: Sabine Lancelin
Actors: Rikita Nandini Shimu, Novera Rahman, Parvin Paru, Deepanwita Martin
Jury’s motivation:
Handed out for the first time in 2004, The Peace Film Award honors films and directors that take up issues of direct, structural, and cultural violence in an artistic manner. In addition, these films should not restrict themselves to highlighting such issues, but also show creative and non-violent ways to overcome avert conditions.
This year’s jury consisted of documentary film maker Christine Cynn, Master student at the Centre for Peace Studies Heidi Darvell, and associate professor in Media- and Documentation Studies Holger Pötzsch.
10 films were nominated, and with very few exceptions, each one of them would have made a worthy winner. In the end, for us, two films stood out among their high-quality competitors. Zacharias Kunuk’s One Day in the Life of Noah Piugatukk and Rubaiyat Hossain’s Made in Bangladesh. Both films take up extremely important issues.
Set in the Canadian Arctic in 1961, the first film tells about a fateful meeting between indigenous Inuit and a White Canadian official. Subtly setting an Inuit world view and life style as an implied norm and opposing it to a Western mindset that appears severely limited in comparison, Kunuk’s film elegantly and forcefully challenges us to question received understandings and taken for granted knowledge. Functioning also as an allegory, it issues a timely warning that resonates across a variety of issues ranging from humanitarian interventionism, via practices of global exploitation to a continued reliance upon colonial archives to describe and determine ‘the other’.
The second film, Rubaiyat Hossain’s Made in Bangladesh, offers a dissection of various forms and relations of oppression in a globalized economic system. Set in contemporary Bangladesh, we follow a young factory worker on her way to founding a trade union to protect her and her co-workers from aggressive and abusive males, avert working conditions, globalized exploitation, and deeply patriarchic structures and practices. Applying an intersectional lens, the film not only offers a detailed picture of work-life in contemporary Bangladesh, but also lays bare racial, gendered, and class-based forms of oppression as well as their interaction and mutual reinforcement.
Both films would have made very worthy winners. In the end, we had to choose and we chose Rubaiyat Hossain’s Made in Bangladesh. This film, one of the three out of ten nominees made by a female director, not only offered a detailed description of various forms of violence at play in the contemporary world, but also carried the deeply inspiring message that collective action matters and makes a difference. This way, Made in Bangladesh shows a clear way forward and, also through its didactic nature, has the potential to inspire further political mobilisation.
Congratulations to Rubaiyat Hossain. The 2020 winner of the Norwegian Peace Film Award is Made in Bangladesh.