Documenting the importance of workplace safety should never be underestimated.
Recently, Aly Muritiba’s C(us)todians was pegged as the winner of the 2013 Healthy Workplaces Film Award at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film (DOK Leipzig). This is the fifth time the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) awards a film prize for the best work-related documentary.
C(us)todians, by Brazilian Filmmaker Aly Muritiba, depicts daily life in a Brazilian prison from the guards’ point of view, portraying a challenging working environment and fostering discussion on psychosocial risks in the workplace, the theme of EU-OSHA’s next Healthy Workplaces Campaign 2014-2015.
Caretakers, Custodians Face Daily Challenges
Awarding the film, the jury said: “Hazardous, unpredictable, stressful and uncertain, the filmmaker is so close to the characters that he provides a real sense of belonging, an insider’s view of the struggle to manage a challenging and potentially explosive work environment. Underfunded, under-resourced and over-worked, the caretakers and custodians are constantly fire-fighting. As the film unfolds through its strong observation, unique access to its characters, distressing sounds and a color palette to match the shades of grey inside the prison, the main protagonist becomes our guiding ‘Guardian Angel’.”
The film award was established in 2009 to promote the importance of workplace health and safety across Europe by challenging and encouraging filmmakers to create and showcase documentary films that focus on the human being in a changing world of work.
The eight nominated films, received from filmmakers all over the world, cover a variety of work-related topics to highlight the importance of safety and health in the workplace. These films, from countries as diverse as Italy, Sweden, Israel and Nepal, deal with topics such as migrant workers, working conditions in supermarkets, an inside report into investment banking, and factory workers.
The nominations were selected from more than 2,240 documentaries, from 114 countries, submitted to DOK Leipzig this year, with the winner decided by an international jury which included film and occupational safety and health experts.
Author Kori Shafer-Stack, Editor, Amaxx Risk Solutions, Inc. is an expert in post-injury response procedures and part of the Amaxx team helping companies reduce their workers compensation costs by 20% to 50%. She is a writer, speaker, and website publisher. www.reduceyourworkerscomp.com. Contact: [email protected].
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