The Giverny Document (Single Channel) by Ja’Tovia M. Gary is the winner of 2019 Locarno Film Festival’s Moving Ahead Award for the Best Film.  Filmed on location in Harlem and in Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, this multi-textured cinematic poem meditates on the bodily integrity and creative virtuosity of black women.

The Moving Ahead jury awarded Ja’Tovia M. Gary because “Gary’s film is a contemplation of the body, of blackness, performance, film form, and political urgency. A rigorous and exciting measure of the capacity of cinema to act as a radical craft; the film works across disciplines and history as revolutionary art”.

Two special mentions went to Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another by Jessica Sarah Rinland and to Shān zhī běi (Osmosis) by ZHOU Tao.

With an elephant’s tusk as the protagonist, ‘Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another’ meditates on the endless tactility of conservation. Shān zhī běi (Osmosis) looks at the interstices between deserts and oases, an area where man and land infiltrate one another. It reenacts through image the reconfiguration of a re-organized reality, and a winter vibrant in its slumber.

The Moving Ahead section aims to explore film’s frontier territories, engaging with new forms of narration and innovation in filmic language.

This year’s jury is made up of film theorist and historian Michael B. Gillespie (United States of America), producer Aline Schmid (Switzerland) and filmmaker Eduardo Williams (Argentina).