It is our great pleasure to announce that this year's laureate of the Marek Nowicki Prize will be Jean-Gabriel Périot - French experimental filmmaker whose films have been presented at WATCH DOCS for 15 years. 

The Marek Nowicki Prize is awarded by the Board of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights for outstanding achievements in portraying human rights in film. 

Jean-Gabriel Périot digs through hours of archival footage to create unique film collages. Sensitivity, philosophical insight, and an editor's perceptive eye ensure that his film installations are always a compelling story about history, the present, politics, and society. Periot's films uniquely combine a commitment to traditional film stock with an avant-garde approach to form. Periot has developed his own editing style and, as he emphasizes in interviews, it is the editing that determines the final overtone of the stories he tells. 

During the 21st WATCH DOCS. Human Rights in Film, we will present a retrospective of Périot's work, including his latest film "Returning to Reims," which premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It is a portrait of the French working class from the 1950s to the present, edited from classic films and archival footage. The film is loosely based on the acclaimed book by French philosopher and sociologist Didier Eribon, whose ideas were filtered through the director's personal and political experiences. For the first time in his work, Periot uses a voiceover, or rather a female voiceover - the famous French actress of the young generation Adèle Haenel.