Several documentaries in production are leaving Sunny Side of the Doc – the world’s biggest nonfiction film marketplace – with renewed momentum and exposure.
Sunny Side wrapped Thursday with an awards ceremony announcing winners of the Pitch Sessions in multiple categories. Winning Best History Pitch was Our Sister Angela: Black Power in the GDR, a film from directors Jascha Hannover and Katharina Warda, produced by Florianfilm GmbH (Germany), Dare Pictures (U.K.), and La Lutta (United States).
It tells a story little known outside the former East Germany – how Angela Davis, the American Black Power activist and Marxist thinker, became a sensation in the GDR (German Democratic Republic), a client state of the USSR. “In East Germany, [Davis] was the biggest superstar ever,” Warda told Deadline after winning the pitch award. “There were statues built in her honor.
There were paintings made of her. She was in every beauty magazine.” The project leverages material shot in the GDR in the 1970s. “Most of that archive was filmed by the East German state, which is also an interesting layer to the story,” Hannover said.
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