Spanish documentary duo Roser Corella and Alfonso Moral scooped the top prize at the Fourth Annual Irish Council for Civil Liberties Human Rights Film Awards Gala, which took place in Dublin’s Light House Cinema tonight (Thursday 28 June 2012).
Their winning film, Machine Man, exposes the working conditions of some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our globalised world. The film invites us to follow the lives and hear the voices of manual workers in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, where millions of men and women carry out all manner of labour in the streets, factories, building sites and on the sea shore. These “machine men” and women are the engine that keeps this bustling metropolis running and their work allows consumers in developed countries such as Ireland to enjoy “bargain” prices for goods produced at immense human cost.
Corella and Moral have an accomplished background in documentary making, photography and video journalism, having collaborated with NGOs and news agencies around the world in locations as diverse as Lebanon, Mozambique, Bangladesh and Senegal.
Accepting their prize, Corella and Moral said:
“This Award comes at just the right time to encourage us to continue working on these important issues. The recognition that this Award gives to Machine Man, gives us that extra motivation to keep working in the defense of human rights, through documentary filmmaking”.
The Gala Screening and Awards ceremony, which played to a capacity audience in Screen 1 of Dublin’s Light House Cinema, also saw joint second place awards going to the films Hold on Tight by Anna Rodgers and Zlata Filipovic, and to another Spanish effort, Padres, Directed by Liz Lobato. A further prize, for the competition’s youth-focussed ‘Under a Minute Challenge’ was presented by RTÉ’s Sinead Kennedy to Laura and Robert Gaynor for their minifilm On the QT.