Award for the film by Portuguese Mónica Martins Nunes

The film “Sortes”, by Portuguese director Mónica Martins Nunes, a Luso-German co-production filmed in Portugal, has received the award for best medium-length film of the year in German cinema, according to producer Primeira Idade.

A documentary film, “Sortes” was awarded at the Deutscher Kurzfilmpreis, national short film awards in Germany.

The award was presented on Thursday by the German Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth.

About 38 minutes long, “Sortes” was shot in the Alentejo, recording the human and rural landscape of the Serpa mountain range, marked by desertification.

“To the rhythm of the work in the fields and through the voice of popular poets, [the film] becomes a portrait of those who stayed and ‘requiem’ to those who went,” reads the synopsis of the work.

“Sortes” had its world premiere in the 2021 edition of the Visions du Réel Festival, in Nyon, Switzerland, as part of the international competition. The Portuguese premiere happened in the same year, at Curtas de Vila do Conde, having also been shown at the Porto/Post/Doc festival, among other events.

Still in 2021, it won the audience award at FIKE – Évora International Short Film Festival.

Mónica Martins Nunes, director and visual artist living and working in Berlin for about a decade, was born in Lisbon in 1990, studied Sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon, graduated and received her Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the Universität der Künste in Berlin (University of the Arts).

In 2017, his first film, “In the ash it gets hot”, was awarded the Golden Dove for best ‘short’, one of the main awards of the DOK Leipzig documentary film festival.

“Na cinza fica calor” follows the inhabitants of Chã das Caldeiras, on Fogo Island in Cape Verde, as they rebuild their daily lives after the volcanic eruption of 2014-2015.

The new film by Mónica Martins Nunes, “Sortes”, was financially supported by the Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual and the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium des Landes, of the city of Berlin.