We’re pleased to announce the winners of the PMA WorldView sH2Orts film competition with WaterAid. The competition was overwhelmed with submissions of stories on the theme ‘The Future of Water’ from all over the world
The four winners will receive a grant of up to £3,000 each to make their 3-5 minute short film. The winning documentary pitches are from Armenia, the Philippines, Sierra Leone and South Africa. Read about the winning story proposals:
Blanketed Snows, Armenia
Vardan Hovhannisyan’s film is set on the slopes of Mount Aragats, following the ups and downs of a scientific project for alpine drinking water. On hearing the news he and his team had won a grant, Hovhannisyan said: “We are very excited to tell the world about the ‘snow blankets’ of Mount Aragats, and the ingenious and surprising ways that scientists in Armenia are doing their part in fighting the water crisis!”
An experienced filmmaker, Hovhannisyan has made A Story of People in War and Peace and The Last Tightrope Dancer in Armenia which were co-produced with PSBs around the world, including the BBC, NHK, SVT, TVP and YLE.
Automatic Tubig Machine, Philippines
Giselle’s Santos’s documentary visits the hilly town of Sison, in the north of the Philippines, where the local government has invested in ‘Automatic Tubig Machines’. The machines dispense clean drinking ‘tubig’ (Filipino for ‘water’) to residents, who can pay using their cash machine cards.
It’s not the first time Giselle Santos has impressed film pitch competition judges for WorldView. In 2013, she produced and directed the short documentary Meal of the Day, about ‘pagpag’ the Filipino dish of scavenged waste food, commissioned by YourWorldView as part of their Thought for Food season.
Place of Sweet Waters, South Africa
Sven Harding charts the warrens of brick tunnels that run beneath Cape Town, transporting millions of litres of Table Mountain’s ‘sweet water’ and dumping it into the ocean. The film follows campaigner Caron von Ziel, who is pressing for the redirection of the fresh water to a water-starved city of four million.
Harding, who won the previous sH2Orts competition, hopes that the film will help raise much-needed awareness for the city’s authorities to stop the waste and channel the potable water to Cape Town’s inhabitants.
The Electric Hoist System, Sierra Leone
Ibrahim S Kamara covers the story of a woman’s quest for safe drinking water and her invention of an ‘electric hoist system’. In Sierra Leone, where only 57 per cent of the population has access to safe drinking water, 19-year-old Khadija hopes her motorised system – which replaces a hand-drawn rope and bucket – will make a big difference.
Kamara is an experienced Sierre Leonean filmmaker and freelance journalist.
