Five experts to decide the winners: Introducing our jury for the Documentary category
No less than four international juries will be choosing which works will bring home awards from this year’s Prix Bohemia Radio festival. The works in the Documentary category will be in the hands of five experts from a variety of spheres and professions.
One of the five jurors selected to judge the Documentary category is composer Eliška Cílková. Her musical works have seen many performances both domestically and abroad and have won several awards (including the AHUV and Musica Nova awards). They have been reviewed in such prestigious periodicals and publications as the New York Times and the Oxford publication Experimental Music Since 1970 by Jennie Goatschalk. After her music studies, Eliška Cílková also studied documentary film at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts’ Documentary Film Department. She shot the award-winning From the Detail to the Whole (Od detailu k celku) (Czech Press Photo Video award) and Pripyat Piano (Silver Eye Award), with the latter film also having been nominated for the Czech Lion Awards (Český lev) and the Czech Film Critics’ Awards (Česká filmová kritika).
Another seat on the jury goes to the Czech screenplay author, script editor, director, and producer Tomáš Bojar. Bojar is behind two feature films in tandem with director Pavel Abrahám: RAPublic and Two Nil. He has worked with director Rozálie Kohoutová on the feature-length documentaries FC Roma and Off Sides (2019). In 2018 he completed the feature-length documentary Breaking News – as well as the five-part documentary The Magnificent Five in cooperation with Zuzana Kirchnerová. He worked as a scriptwriter on Martin Mareček’s documentary Dálava. Right now he’s wrapping up a feature-length documentary with the working title Guardians of the Gate.
His films have been shown at a number of international film festivals, including the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Visions du Réel Nyon, BAFICI Buenos Aires, London Open City Documentary Festival, DOXA Documentary Film Festival Vancouver, Kasseler Dok Fest, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
A grand total of twenty jurors will be deciding the winners of the 37th annual Prix Bohemia Radio festival awards. Five national and international radio professionals will sit on each of the juries for the documentary, drama, reportage, and multimedia categories and decide which works will reach the main competition.
The Czech journalist Vít Pohanka will be a juror for the Documentary category as well. Pohanka worked briefly for Czech Television’s news service in the 1990s, then at UNESCO in Paris, where he began as an external partner to Czech Radio. After three years at the BBC’s Czech editorial department in Prague and London, he spent a total of 15 years in the international editorial department of Czech Radio’s news service. He provided war reports from Kosovo and Iraq and went on to serve as Czech Radio’s permanent correspondent in Belgium, the United States, and Poland.
In recent years, Pohanka has been focusing on outputs for Czech Radio Plus (its Zaostřeno, Historie Plus and Téma Plus programs). He is also the author of a number of radio documentaries, e.g. the Genius loci documentary series. He has recently begun working with Czech Television as well.
He is a major podcast fan. To keep from losing touch with the Anglosphere, he takes inspiration from a number of podcasts, mainly from the USA, like Bowery Boys and This American Life, along with BBC documentaries and reports and opinion newscasts: Global News Podcast, Americast, and The Documentary.
The first of the international personalities on this jury is Alia Cassa who has maded documentaries for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, the World Service, and Tate galleries. She is a regular producer on Radio 4’s Short Cuts, where she is also part of the curatorial team. She has a special interest in poetry, the arts, and theater, and has created various features for the BBC with Falling Tree Productions, including Afterwords: Susan Sontag, surveying the legacy of Sontag’s writing, The Art of Survival, telling stories of homelessness and the redemptive power of art, and the documentary series Living Memory, speaking to British centenarians on their thoughts for the future.
These four jurors will be supplemented by Grete Strøm, who has been working with sound since she was 21. Over the years, she’s both been a radio host and a reporter, but has dedicated herself more and more to storytelling through her radio documentaries. She’s particularly interested in exploring the lives, minds, and stories of everyday people.
Grete has created miniseries and single episodes for Norwegian podcasts and radio shows. In 2019 she delivered her biggest series so far: Lord of the Ring Pulls. This series won first place in Prix Europa for Best Radio Documentary Series.
