Reported by Features Editor Mat Gallagher:
The Rory Peck awards, which celebrate the work of freelance shooters across the globe, has announced this year’s winners. Sponsored by Sony, the awards highlight the extreme situations many freelancers are willing to put themselves through. Without the backing of a big news organisations they have managed to get some staggering footage. The awards were presented on Wednesday at a ceremony at the British Film Institute in London by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and James Mates of ITN.
The awards ceremony included the two Rory Peck Awards, for features and news, alongside a Sony Impact award and the Martin Adler award for newsgathering, which this year went to Azerbaijan native, Idrak Abbasov, who continued to cover the violent protests in his home country even after being beaten unconscious during a previous shoot. Bangladeshi freelancers Soumen Guha and Dipak Chandra Sutradhar won the Sony Impact Award for their exposé on the appalling conditions in a leather factory, supplying goods to Europe on the outskirts of Dkaha.
The two Rory Peck prizes however, both went to British freelancers covering foreign conflict stories. The features award went to Olly Lambert’s Syria: Across the Lines, which documents the life on either side of the conflict in the Orontes River Valley. A human story, commissioned and broadcast by Channel 4 Dispatches. Perhaps the most intresting, and by far the most gripping was the winner of the news category, which went to Aris Roussinos for Ground Zero Mali: The Battle of Gao. The piece shows a street battle in northern Mali between the Malian army and the Mujao Islamists. Self-funded but then broadcast by Vice, this is heart of the action stuff, with all its harrowing violence and almost comical realness.
For more info on the award winners visit: https://rorypecktrust.org/Awards/2013/Award-Finalists
