Those among the SPOT audience with a liking for film can look forward to three strong, Nordic documentaries, which can be seen for free at Godsbanen and in Øst for Paradis during the festival.

SPOT film can now announce three titles for the main selection, SPOT The Film, which focuses on the cream of new, Nordic film production, fiction and non-fiction. The films in this section compete for the first SPOT Film Award, which will be given away on the last day of SPOT, the fourth of May, at the art cinema Øst for Paradis (“East of Eden” –ed.). Before that, the films will be showing at Godsbanen and in Øst for Paradis, several of them presented by the directors themselves and all of them for free.

The first one, Portrait of a Lone Farmer, takes the audience to a small, remote Nigerian village, where the director, Danish/Nigerian Jide Tom Akinleminu, looks up his father, whom he has not seen for five years. His father lives a simple life as a chicken farmer and through Akinleminu’s beautiful, almost meditative images – his background as a cinematographer is evident – we witness the reestablishment of the bond between father and son.

Torn-apart family ties also loom large in Danish-Palestinian Mahdi Fleifel’s A World Not Ours, and rarely do you come across such a moving, yet relieving and humorous non-fiction film as this documentary about life in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. For the director the camp is synonymous with happy holiday memories from his childhood, but that is not the case for the remaining family, to whom the camp will always be a world which is not theirs. A World Not Ours will arrive at SPOT with a truckload of international award including the prestigious Peace Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival.

From one homeless people to the next: In the honest and poetic Pine Ridge the Swedish director Anna Eborn portrays a group of young native Americans, their lives and dreams in the reservation Pine Ridge, the poorest region in the US. One critic put it this way, “If Terrence Mallick made a documentary, this is what it would be like”.
Pine Ridge was selected for Venice Film Festival, and has recently won the Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary at the Göteborg International Film Festival

Another seven films will be announced for the main competition, SPOT The Film. You can see the programme so far here