Five experts that will decide on the winners. Introducing the panel of judges in the Documentary category
Four international panels of judges will be deciding on which radio works will be taking home the prizes from the Prix Bohemia Radio festival. The order of the works in the Documentary category will be in the hands of five experts.
The author of sound installations, performer and multimedia artist Ladislav Železný will be among those sitting on the panel in the category of Documentaries. He currently works in Czech Radio as a Sound Designer and as the Curator of the R{A}DIO{CUSTICA} project. In 2011, he was one of the finalists of the project Europe - a Sound Panorama in ZKM. In 2019 he was awarded the prestigious Karl Sczuka Preise together with Jiří Adámek. He has been actively connected with radio, broadcasting and the airwaves since his studies. He contributed as one of the authors to the broadcasting of the radio station Lemurie TAZ, which is connected with the beginning of the operation of the experimental ROXY/NoD space.
The next spot in the panel went to a priest of a small rural community in the South Hana district and, with a slight exaggeration, three Brno theatres, a Brno public space and one Vyškov petrol station, Jan Hanák. The focal point of his work consists of documentaries. He is currently preparing a thirteen-part documentary project for Czech Television, Forbidden God (Zakázaný Bůh), being a series of little big stories from the past totalitarian era. He has made his biggest mark so far in radio work with the documentary Diptych, in which he accompanies a young man through his dying and death, for which he received first prize at the 2016 Prix Bohemia Radio festival, as well as the documentaries Dancing Barbershop (Roztančená oficína) and Half-time of a Return (Poločas návratu).
The winners of the 36th annual Prix Bohemia Radio festival will be decided by twenty jury members. A jury of five professional personalities from the local and international radio environment will decide which works will advance to the main competition in each of the categories of documentaries, dramas, news reports and multimedia.
The Director of the Center for Documentary Film, Šimon Bauer, will also be one of the panel’s judges. The Director of a year-long project oriented on education through documentary films and on the study of documentary film and its media essence, he has been actively working in the area of audiovisual education since 2013. In the same year, as the main organiser together with Masaryk University in Brno, Palacký University in Olomouc and Charles University in Prague, he put together the local edition of the largest European conference of media and film theorists, NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies). In 2013, he coordinated the introduction of university operations in Brno’s Scala cinema. He led several research seminars oriented on the history of television in the Czech Republic. Since 2011, he has been cooperating intensively with the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.
The first foreign personality on the panel will be the Director of Falling Tree Productions, Eleanor McDowall. As a producer of BBC Radio 4's Short Cuts, she won gold in 2017 and 2018 for the best radio podcast at the British Podcast Awards. Her documentary work won an award at Prix Europa, the “Audio Recognition Award” at Whicker's World Foundation and gold for the best factual storytelling. In her free time she operates the Radio Atlas podcast, the home page for titled audio in the English language from all over the world.
These four judges will be joined by moderator and reporter Grete Strom, which has been working with audio for more than seventeen years. Over time, she has become more and more involved in storytelling and making documentaries. She is interested in discovering the lives and thoughts of everyday people. She is the author of a miniseries and the individual episodes of a Norwegian podcast. In 2019, she created her largest documentary series to date: “Lord of the Ring Pulls”. The series won the best documentary series at the Prix Europe awards.
