And the Winners 2025 are …

The Doc Alliance Alliance Award winners announced at the Cannes Film Festival.

The winners of the awards received 8.000 EUR for the directors, to be spent on their next project (5.000 EUR for the Best Feature and 3.000 EUR for the Best Short).

The Doc Alliance Award for Best Feature Film was presented to “The Shards” (‘Oskolky’, Georgia/Germany) by Masha Chernaya. The film draws from the director’s personal experience. In spring 2022, Masha prepares to leave her homeland, Russia. What follows is a series of unexpected goodbyes: her mother dies of cancer, her partner escapes military conscription, and everything — including her former self — begins to fall apart. As a way to process her grief, she turns to her camera, capturing everything.

The jury praised the film “for its unique cinematic qualities” and honoured its “cinematic language that is quiet, resistant to classic narrative structures, and develops a striking ability to merge personal and collective mourning.”

The Doc Alliance Award for Best Short Film went to “We Had Fun Yesterday” (Belgium) by Marion Guillard. In her film, the director reflects on her relationship with herself and her body, her distance from conventional ideals of femininity, and unsettling encounters with men — an autobiographical exploration intertwined with reflections on how we perceive others: animals, whether wild or caged; nature, whether untouched or shaped by human intervention.

The jury described the film as “an honest and beautifully crafted work that creates a tender rhythm through its layering of image and voiceover. Marion Guillard pulls us into her imagery and stream of consciousness, through a narrative (full of surprises,) interweaving personal quests of identity and family relations with views of being a filmmaker.“

Doc Alliance Selection available online

A selection of the nominated films for the Doc Alliance Awards 2025 will be available Doc Alliance’s platform, DAFilms.com from May 20th, Grey Zone (feature), Shuruuk (short), 23:23 (short), Bamssi (short).