From Investigating Syrian Drugs to Scandals Involving Children: The 2024 DIG Festival Awards Shortlist (original) (raw)

The shortlist of investigative films for the annual DIG Awards in Italy features titles looking into issues ranging from drug trafficking by senior members of the Syrian regime to the persecution of alleged collaborators in Ukraine. An international jury will select the winners from this shortlist.

Standing for Documentari, Inchieste, Giornalismi (“Documentaries, Investigations, Journalism,”) DIG is a nonprofit organization that supports watchdog journalism around the world. It will announce winners from among more than two dozen documentary films and five podcast series at the 10th edition of the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy, later this week.

Here, we detail the investigative long-form finalists (for films that last more than 40 minutes) and investigations in the medium-length category (15 – 40 minutes). According to the jury, these projects “use original sources and investigative techniques to bring out elements of novelty in relation to the subject matter.”

Summaries of the five finalists in the audio and podcast category — which “tackle relevant international stories using an investigative angle, original reporting techniques, and a distinctive approach” — can also be found on the DIG website.

Investigative Film Finalists (Long-Form)

‘ Syria: Addicted to Captagon’ (BBC Eye Investigations)

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

The amphetamine-like drug Captagon has ravaged vulnerable communities in the Middle East — and this deep-dive investigation from BBC Eye, reported in collaboration with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), “uncovered direct links between this multi-billion dollar drug trade and senior members of President Bashar al-Assad’s family and the Syrian Armed Forces,” according to the filmmakers. The project followed leads in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and its evidence included court records, bank transactions, WhatsApp messages, and events witnessed in ride-alongs on raids. Remarkably, the team was able to secure interviews for the project’s lead reporter, Rasha Qandeel, with both a former Syrian officer and a Syrian soldier involved with the scheme, who revealed how an elite army unit provided armed escorts for drug shipments and cash deliveries. The film also includes testimony by a German organized crime investigator on the scheme’s alleged links to the Syrian ruling family, based on surveillance evidence and suspect interrogations.

‘Murder in Tetovo’ (Investigative Reporters Laboratory/Macedonian Radio-television – MRT1 )

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

In September 2021, a fire killed 14 people when it raged through a hospital for COVID-19 patients in the town of Tetovo, in North Macedonia. The country’s government claimed the hospital had been constructed “in accordance with all designated procedures and standards.” This documentary shows how a team with the Investigative Reporters Laboratory not only found major problems with this claim, but also exposed “a shocking government conspiracy.” The all-woman reporting team showed that key forensic evidence from independent experts had been ignored by prosecutors, and suggested that the government investigation “was intentionally sabotaged.” The facial expressions of the reporters in the film tell their own story: they often stare at prosecutors with such withering looks of scornful disbelief that the officials sometimes stumble over their increasingly flimsy denials.

‘Collaborators! Ukraine Confronts its Traitors’ (ARTE)

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

How are Ukrainian authorities and citizens treating compatriots accused of cooperating with the country’s Russian invaders? This documentary from France’s ARTE TV explored this struggle, and found examples of both justice and chilling persecution. It reveals incidents beyond the scope of almost 7,000 collaboration prosecutions underway in Ukraine’s courts. According to the filmmakers, “mayors, teachers, priests, soldiers, ordinary citizens — these ‘enemies’ from within, accused of disclosing crucial information to the Russian army, are relentlessly hunted down by their compatriots and subjected to arbitrary arrests, often based on mere rumors.”

‘October 7’ (Al Jazeera Investigations Unit)

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

As a United Nations report found in March, some Hamas militants committed rape and “sexualized torture” against women during and after the terrorist group’s coordinated attack on Israeli civilians on October 7. However in addition to documenting “widespread human rights abuses by Hamas fighters and others who crossed the fence from Gaza into Israel” this documentary by Al Jazeera Investigations alleged that some of the most incendiary claims of Hamas abuses were false, and were used and amplified to justify an over-lethal response by the Israel Defense Forces that has killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza. These narratives included claims by media and politicians of the mass killing of babies. Al Jazeera said its conclusions were based on forensic analysis of several hours of video footage from CCTV, dash cams, phones, and headcams of events on the day of the attack.

‘The Swedish Sperm Scandal’ (SVT Play)

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

The past few years have seen several cases in which body parts or biological material donated for medical research has been used for other purposes, without donor consent. This investigation by SVT exposed the use of sperm that was donated for research or testing being used for illegal insemination in Swedish hospitals. The team cross-referenced data from DNA testing and gathered testimonies to track births at a hospital in the city of Halmstad to five donors who had done nothing more than provide sperm samples for routine infertility treatments. Referring to other cases, the team added that “some men — who during their military service had been recruited… as donors for research purposes — discovered that their sperm was used without their consent.”

Investigative Film Finalists (Medium Length)

‘Daniel’s Story’ (The Outlaw Ocean Project)

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

How do you show the scale of a hidden rights abuse phenomenon without comprehensive data sources or government attribution? This was the challenge faced by The Outlaw Ocean Project — a nonprofit that investigates human and environmental abuses on the high seas — when it looked into the treatment of young Indonesian men recruited to work in China’s vast “distant water” fishing fleet. Their investigative documentary opens with a revealing source: a Bahasa language interpreter based in Uruguay who has fielded “hundreds” of urgent calls from port agents to interpret for distressed or injured Indonesian crew members on visiting Chinese fishing boats. One of the many deckhands she assisted was a young Indonesian man named Daniel Aritonang, who was dumped on a dock in Montevideo, and who “whispered to her that he’d been beaten, tied by the neck, and hadn’t eaten for weeks.” Days later, Aritonang reportedly died from malnutrition and vitamin deficiency. Documenting abuses that recall stories of maritime servitude from the 18th century, the film reveals conditions where Indonesian crew are given two boxes of instant noodles and “dirty water” weekly, and can be denied all contact with their families for a year or more. According to the filmmakers, Aritonang’s story exposes a “world of neglect and violence; one in which they would be captives with little to no hope of escape.”

‘Betrayal at Birth: Georgia’s Stolen Children’ (BBC News)

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

In 2014, a teenager in Georgia saw a girl on the reality TV show Georgia’s Got Talent who appeared to be a mirror image of herself. The pair, Amy and Ano, would later discover that they were biological twins, and that they had been stolen from their mother at birth and sold to separate families. Their mother had been told her twins had died in childbirth. Another woman, Tamuna Museridze — a journalist — discovered that her own birth certificate was fake, and began a broader investigation that other reporters, children, and grieving mothers, would later join. This investigative film by BBC News not only unearthed a massive illegal adoption scheme in Georgia prior to 2006, but also tracked the bitter-sweet private investigations by its victims, as well as the family confrontations and reunions that followed. As the filmmakers noted: “The documentary sheds light on the personal stories of numerous children who were forced to face the same fate as Amy and Ano and raises questions about an extremely disturbing and mostly unknown practice.”

‘The Crossing’ (France 2)

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

Every year, thousands of migrants and asylum seekers cross from France to England in small, unseaworthy boats ranging from dinghies to rafts and even kayaks. Media reports on this often tragic and politically explosive migrant route routinely reference drowning risks, abuses in transit, and human smuggling, but details tend to be scarce due to the fears of migrants and the criminality of traffickers. For this documentary, reporter Julien Goudichaud joined 50 migrants in a small boat and crossed the English Channel himself, and filmed key moments in the whole process. Goudichaud found that “tickets” range from €1,000 to €3,500 (US$1,100 to $3,900), and interviewed Iranian and Kurdish traffickers who control the route and smugglers who work the beaches around Calais. He also zeroed in on a kingpin based in the UK.

‘With Every Breath’ (ProPublica)

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

Before a recall of some 15 million breathing devices, thousands of patients lodged complaints about allegedly harmful effects from a defect in a CPAP breathing assistance machine made by a giant company. A print investigative series by ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette dug into these complaints, and the chaotic fallout from the eventual recall. Released as an accompaniment to that in-depth series, this short film focuses on the experiences of three vulnerable patients, and how one doctor had to navigate the massive recall. According to the filmmakers, the film “humanizes a public health crisis that has affected millions and whose scope may not be known for years, if ever.” (See the methodology behind the broader medical devices investigation at this link, which included access to a vast complaints repository called MAUDE, and the use of a search engine called Device Events to sort through that database.)

‘The Stolen Children of Ukraine’ (ARTE)

Image: Screenshot, DIG Awards

Some 20,000 Ukrainian children have reportedly been illegally deported to Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — a potential war crime that is being investigated by the International Criminal Court. This film by ARTE TV investigated the organization of this scheme, as well as the fate of these stolen children. The methodology for the investigation included an analysis of social media posts, Russian propaganda, and video evidence on Telegram, as well as a series of telling interviews. Two of these interviews revealed that children were invited to forge their parent’s signatures for school permission letters to travel to “holiday camps” across the border in Russia. In one case involving 600 Ukrainian children described in the film, this was followed by a second trick, in which teenagers were told they would need to apply for Russian passports in order to return. According to the filmmakers, Ukrainian children like these “are indoctrinated, given foster families, and even offered for adoption.”

Rowan Philp is GIJN’s senior reporter. He was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.