‘To Hold a Mountain,’ a Meditation on Sisterhood, Grief and Perseverance, Wins Top Prize at Millennium Docs Against Gravity

“To Hold a Mountain,” a documentary from directing duo Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić about sisterhood and solitude in the Montenegrin highlands, won the Grand Prix at Millennium Docs Against Gravity during an award ceremony in Warsaw on Thursday.

The film, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year, was praised by the jury as “a nuanced portrayal of sisterhood, adolescence and the profound, generative role that nature and family hold in shaping who we are.” Variety‘s Murtada Elfadl described it as “an emotionally shattering meditation on grief and perseverance.”

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“The film takes us into a magical world — a chosen solitude shared between an aunt and her niece, redrawing for us the beauty of family bonds within an enchanting natural landscape and rural tradition filled with love and patience,” said the jury. “The same patience is shown by the filmmakers themselves, as they quietly observed and captured every subtle detail of a story that speaks to the reunion of humanity with nature.”

Twelve films competed for the Grand Prix – Bank Millennium Award at the 23rd Millennium Docs Against Gravity, which wraps in Warsaw and six other Polish cities May 17. The jury was comprised of Oscar-nominated Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki (“Of Fathers and Sons”), Danish cinematographer and director Lea Glob (“Olmo and the Seagull”) and Osar-nominated producer Jessica Hargrave (“Come See Me in the Good Light”). The festival will continue online from May 19 – June 1.

A special mention in the main competition was awarded to “A Fox Under a Pink Moon,” the IDFA-winning documentary from directors Mehrdad Oskouei and Soraya Akhlaghi, which scooped two other prizes Thursday night, including the Amnesty International Poland Award and the FIPRESCI Award, presented by the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) at Millennium Docs for the first time. 

Other awards from the main competition included the prize for best cinematography, which went to “Closure,” from Polish filmmaker and cinematographer Michał Marczak. The award for best editing went to “Time and Water,” from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sara Dosa (“Fire of Love”).

The festival’s award for best Polish film went to “Candidates of Death,” director Maciej Cuske’s decade-long portrait of a father, his son and two young friends making an amateur horror film. A special mention went to directors Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk’s “Traces,” a powerful portrayal of Ukrainian women who refuse to remain silent after surviving sexual assault during the war with Russia. The film also won the Smakjam Award for Best Production in the Polish competition.

With Millennium Docs simultaneously unspooling across seven Polish cities, several awards were also handed out at the festival’s satellite venues. “Mariinka,” Belgian filmmaker Pieter-Jan de Pue’s CPH:DOX-opening documentary about young lives shattered by the war in Ukraine, won the Mayor of Gdynia Award and the City of Poznań Freedom Award. The ART.DOC Award, presented in the city of Bydgoszcz, went to Greek director Lucas Paleocrassas’ “Bugboy,” a sensitive portrayal of youth.

Commenting on this year’s edition, festival director Artur Liebhart said it “has again been a joy of celebrating documentary film’s genre in all varieties of its forms.” 

“We have significantly enlarged activities for the industry this year, giving new opportunities to develop film projects at and with our festival. Over 200 filmmakers and other industry professionals have seen sold-out screenings rooms,” said Leibhart. “We have lifted up the status of a documentary film in social-cultural perception to the level unprecedented in most other countries.”

Earlier in the week, at the festival’s opening ceremony, FIPRESCI launched the Documentary Grand Prix for best documentary film of the year, which was selected through a vote by the critics group’s members. That award went to “Fiume o Morte!,” from Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinović, whose Rotterdam-winning docufiction wittily combines archival footage and historical reenactments to revisit the 1919 occupation of the politically disputed city of Fiume by Italian fascists. 

During a Q&A after a special screening of the film in Warsaw, Bezinović — a native of the modern-day Fiume, now called Rijeka — described “Fiume o Morte!” as a cinematic “reappropriation of history.” Employing a cast of non-professional locals, the film playfully interrogates the brutal but bungled occupation while also allowing its actors — many of whom are descendants of the fascists’ victims — to reinterpret and reclaim a chapter in their city’s past. It was a way for them, said Bezinović, to take “revenge through storytelling and art.”

The power and possibility of documentary filmmaking was a theme throughout the week. At the opening ceremony, festival artistic director Karol Piekarczyk took a none-too-subtle jab at German filmmaker Wim Wenders and the manifold controversies that swirled around this year’s Berlin Film Festival, where jury president Wenders insisted that filmmakers should “stay out of politics.”

“I’m not going to take issue with the person that said it, but with the sentiment,” said Piekarczyk. “I don’t know since when basic human rights have become political. We didn’t make them political. I think there is a deep misunderstanding about how filmmakers work, especially documentary filmmakers.” 

Piekarczyk referenced the Ukrainian filmmaker Kovalenko, whose “Traces” — which won the Panorama Audience Award at this year’s Berlinale — is based on the director’s experiences as a survivor of sexual violence and follows six Ukrainian women attempting to transform their trauma into collective agency and hope.

“Alisa didn’t make her film because she had this list and she just figured how she’s going to make a film,” Piekarczyksaid. “She made it because it’s a personal story, but it’s a story that people have to hear. It’s a story about how sexual violence is treated like a weapon.”

It was Kovalenko who offered one of the week’s more stirring moments during a panel discussion about documentary film as an act of resilience. The director recounted her own experience as a captive of Russian forces, who have systematically used sexual violence and other forms of torture against Ukrainian women.

It took two years for Kovalenko to speak publicly about her captivity and torture. Ultimately, however, she came to believe that she “had no choice” but to use her platform as a documentary filmmaker to share the stories of other survivors.

“From the first meeting of our community, we talked a lot about documentary film as a tool of advocacy, to fight for justice, to amplify the voices of survivors, to document war crimes,” she said. 

“Culture has become a battlefield. Cinema has become our weapon against the aggressor,” she continued. “After the [full-scale Russian] invasion, I can’t think about cinema as art. It’s about your responsibility as an artist. We’re all becoming a resistance, to make the world better.”