Divia wins the Green Dog Award | WATCH DOCS

The jury of this year’s Green Competition consisted of Michalina Czerwońska, Urszula Jabłońska, and Robert Jurszo. The Green Dog Award was granted to Dmytro Hreshko for the film Divia.

Who will clean up after the war? Who will defuse hundreds of thousands of landmines and unexploded ordnance? Who will purify the water and process the tons of scrap metal that war machines turn into? Who will feed abandoned cats, and who will restore livable spaces for traumatized animals? Divia provokes all these questions. War is an unimaginable tragedy for everyone: humans and other animals, plants, and the land itself.
Dmytro Hreshko consciously abandons words, allowing images to speak instead: hectares of burned forests, the fear of animals stunned by explosions. War erases the distinction between human and animal death; the earth treats every body the same. Yet we cannot hope that nature will always regenerate. Hreshko’s film refuses to let us look away from the ecocide that is an integral part of the war in Ukraine.

A Special Mention in the Green Competition was awarded to Close to the Ground, directed by Tomáš Elšík.

How do we act when a cause seems already lost? Why restore a peat bog doomed to destruction, or search for those responsible for poisoning wild animals if sentences are always too lenient? Where can perseverance and hope be found? In Resilience, meaning appears to arise from action itself — from the possibility of participating in the rich entanglements of earthly life, which, in an era of rapid and often irreversible change, feels more valuable than ever.
Tomáš Elšík allows us to observe plants and birds from a proximity usually unavailable to us, building intimacy between the viewer and the multitude of on-screen protagonists. Human and non-human narratives intertwine, leaping across different scales of time and space.