EPICENTRO, the new documentary by Hubert Sauper, has been selected to be part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition by the 2020 Sundance Festival (January 23 to February 2). ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENEZUELA by Anabel Rodríguez Ríos, produced by Austrian producer Sepp R. Brudermann as a co-production between Venezuela, the UK, Brazil and Austria, is also among the 12 entries of the  Sundance documentary contest.

Hubert Sauper, Austria's most adventurous and unpredictable documentarist and essayist, received the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for best Documentary at this year's Sundance festival for his film EPICENTRO.

«(…) a film that weaves together vérité footage with voiceover philosophizing from Sauper himself and clips from an assortment of archive footage. In another filmmaker's hands, this might have become a message-heavy morass, but Sauper and his co-editor, veteran Yves Deschamps work the material with a remarkable fluidity and gracefulness that's consistently engaging and surprising», wrote Leslie Felperin on EPICENTRO, Hubert Sauper’s tender portrait of Cuba and winner of the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Prize.

F:ACT Award:
WOOD by Monica Lazurean-Gorgan, Michaela Kirst, Ebba Sinzinger (world premiere)
Main Competition:
EPICENTRO by Hubert Sauper (European premiere)
Science Films:
ROBOLOVE by Maria Arlamovsky
SPACE DOGS by Elsa Kremser & Levin Peter

Hubert Sauper‘s films are voyages of discovery in the global present. While he exposed the networks rooted in colonialism from an African perspective in Darwin’s Nightmare and We Come as Friends, he has adopted a new focus in EPICENTRO. His new film is a multi-faceted essayist encounter with the Caribbean island of Cuba. In it the filmmaker explores the historical background to the many connotations surrounding power and longing here, a story which proceeds in a spiral of liberation and conquest. A dynamic which is driven in no small part by the powerful medium of cinema itself.

A remarkable closing ceremony for Austrian filmmakers at the Filmkunstfest Mecklenburg Vorpommern in the German town of Schwerin with no less than three awards: David Clay Diaz garnered the Flying Ox Award for best feature film for his directorial debut ME, WE Arash T. Riahi followed with the LEO Children & Youth Film Award for OSKAR & LILLI and Hubert Sauper’s EPICENTRO took the prize for Best Cinematography.