Prix Europa’s Online award screenings start today. The category is coordinated by Kare Vedding Poulsen from Denmark, cross-media manager at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation for the last ten years, and BBC’s Silvia Costeloe from the UK. Silvia spoke to me about the Online category at Prix Europa 2014. She also shared insights from her extensive experience in using new technologies efficiently to tell stories, which has always been at the heart of her job at BBC World News. Her main task is to harness Social media to improve journalism on Social platforms during news-gathering and on air.

Listen to the interview:

https://soundcloud.com/user-409450725/silvia-costeloe

It’s quite common to visit a festival and nevertheless manage to watch one or two films only. A paradox? All those appointments and work don’t leave us much time for what is most fulfilling in our line of work: watching well-made documentary films.

That’s what’s so good about Prix Europa, which started yesterday at the Radio building in Berlin. During the course of one week, you can not only watch documentaries but also participate in the discussion at the end of each day of screening.

There are 23 entries in the TV Doc category, for instance. They were selected out of the 200 submitted from all over Europe. The jury are the filmmakers themselves, who must watch each day’s films and vote after a discussion at the end of the day and grade each film from 1 to 10, based on five criteria. The highest-rated film will earn the title of the Best Documentary of the Year at the end of the week and will receive 6,000 euro. And what’s most important – the judges are the strictest ones possible: fellow producers and channel CEs.

Everyone can attend as an observer, even if you don’t have a film of your own, and participate in the interesting debate every evening.

I am Cuba is being screened today.  Current Affairs Documentary category starts tomorrow (Tuesday), as well as the cross-media projects competing for the Online award. On Wednesday, it’s time for Iris, with films of intercultural interest. The Queen of Silence features among the competing films: Ten-year-old Denisa is an outcast in more ways than one. She is an illegal citizen, living in a gypsy camp in Poland, but most of all she does not speak, as no one has ever diagnosed her severe hearing disabilities. She lives in a world of her own, full of rhythm and dance, imitating the glamorous women from Bollywood DVDs she found in a nearby garbage bin. Dancing, she can be anyone she wants, even a queen; she can escape the harsh reality and express all that she cannot speak in words – joy, sadness and fear.