AT THE END of April, the Czech city of Ostrava hosted the International Film Festival TUR (Permanently Sustainable Development), which culminated in awards being presented to the best films. Among those recognised was Slovak director Pavol Barabáš, who was awarded the International Jury Prize for his film Bhutan – In Search of Happiness (Bhután – Hľadanie šťastia).
The film is about the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, its traditional Buddhist philosophy and its attempts to develop while avoiding some of the mistakes made by other countries.
The international jury was composed of four environmental experts, the TASR newswire wrote. The festival’s main award – The Award of the Mayor of the City of Ostrava – went to a German documentary, The Crayfish in the Jam Jar, which highlights the decline of a unique animal species in southern Germany. Other prizes went to a US documentary, A Land Out of Time; a seven-part series about Czech and Moravian caves entitled Let’s Go Down Under (Vzhůru dolů) which was produced by Czech Television in Brno; and a Czech documentary movie, The Hospital at the End of the World (Nemocnice na konci světa) which is about the construction of a hospital at the foot of a Himalayan glacier in Nepal.
It was the festival’s sixth year and attracted more than 60 documentaries from all over the world. The festival aims to contribute to awareness of the value of natural resources to the life of every human being and the need to protect them.
