The Danish documentary ‘Et hjem i verden’ (At Home in the World), directed by Andreas Koefoed, has won the ‘Best Mid-Length Documentary’ award at the world’s largest documentary festival, the IDFA in Amsterdam.
Koefoed’s film depicts the day-to-day lives of five asylum-seeker children at a Red Cross asylum school in Lynge in Denmark. The IDFA jury credited the film with tackling a current issue in a sensitive way.
“We are especially pleased with a film that manages to humanise the issues we are so concerned about today,” the jury wrote in its justification for the award.
“With great sensitivity and compassion for its characters, the director gives a face to the most vulnerable of refugees, children bravely coping with a new world. We were deeply moved by a film that provides people everywhere a slight ray of hope.”
New perspective
Sara Stockman, the film’s producer, sees it as an important supplement to the media coverage of the refugee crisis.
“At the same time it shows the public are looking for significant stories that can put the mainstream media’s coverage of the refugee crisis in perspective,” she said.
“Children are often represented by numbers. Andreas chooses to show the children are normal children, but caught in an unusual situation.”
