Anthropologist and acclaimed director Mantas Kvedaravičius was a member of our association and this film award in his name is a way for us to celebrate his memory and pay tribute to his unique work. The Award also gives an opportunity to keep focus on the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine,and reaffirm our unambiguous support to Ukraine’s anti-imperialist engagement illustrated by Mantas's work. The Award provides an occasion for our community to affirm our values and recognize Mantas's intellectual, political and artistic legacy of courage and love.

Call for films

The Mantas Kvedaravičius prize distinguishes a medium or long feature documentary that is remarkable by its cinematographic anthropological and engaged dimensions, and as such, in the wake of Mantas Kvedaravičius's path in research, creation and action. Mantas Kvedaravičius's approach was that of a documentary tradition with strong narrative construction and storytelling, close to the visual codes and grammar of feature films (he is also the director of feature films Prologos and Partenonas that premiered in venice in 2019).

Mantas Kvedaravičius's cinema was ethnographic in the sense that it resulted from long-term engagement on the field, and explored ethnographic questions such as memory, lived experiences of violence, temporality, the everyday of conflicts, etc. His work on dangerous and sensitive fields was in touch with burning political and social issues, and recognized as an important contribution to the advancement of human rights. However, his visual research was clearly distinct from 'investigative' approaches: it was attached to a poetry of images (minute attention to light, long shots, slowness, sensitive dimension focusing on the texture of things and beings through a work of image and sound). In this sense, Kvedaravičius's cinema was not about denouncing but capturing the everyday and profound experience of conflicts on our social bodies, through the visible and the invisible.

Conditions for entry

The films proposed will be reviewed by our panel of judges, who will select the winning film. We will make the winning film available to EASA members on the online day of the conference (July 18th). The Award ceremony with a Q&A with the directors, will be held online on the 18th.

Deadline for submissions: July 12

Please fill out all the fields in the proposal link >>

If you have any queries related to film submissions, please write to films(at)easaonline.org.