“A documentary that illuminates, moves and opens spaces for listening and reflection. For its poetic, political and profoundly human strength, the jury of the Salento International Film Festival awards Nyumba the prize for Best Documentary 2025”. “The Felix Prize Jury wanted to reward the poetic strength of the story, the evocative use of images and sound and the ability to blend different languages and perspectives into a single, powerful testimony of shared humanity”. These two excerpts from the motivations that accompanied the presentation of the prizes in Milan and Tricase at the end of November. A few days earlier, the screenwriter Paola Bottero and the director Francesco del Grosso had collected the Special Prize from the Catania Film Festival: the second for Nyumba after the Special Mention from the youth jury at Visioni dal Mondo – International Documentary Festival.
With the Best Director Award at the Asti Film Festival, section. “Asti DOC”, the awards at the end of this first festival round rise to 5.
An appreciation from numerous Festivals that Anton Giulio Grande, president of the Calabria Film Commission, commented as follows: «I believe the reasons that accompany the awards to the docufilm Nyumba are a synthesis of its strength. I am thinking for example of that of the Felix Prize which underlines “the sensitivity and depth with which it recounts the encounter between cultures, transforming the theme of immigration into an internal journey of identity and rebirth”. It is an inner journey that also tells about Calabria, capable of making itself known not only for its artistic and natural beauty, but also for the beauty of the people who live there, capable of welcoming and making anyone who chooses to experience it feel at home. A way of welcoming that has always been typical of Calabria.”
Twenty festivals, six of which are international, over 30 screenings, more than two months, discussions with film critics, juries, audiences and students, is the positive outcome of Nyumba just over two months after its release.
The choral stories of Abdulaye, Alex, Hafsa, Moussa, Sisì, are continuing to convince and move, “through an empathetic, rigorous and never intrusive cinematic gaze, the film explores the concept of “home” not as a simple physical place, but as identity, memory, belonging and collective breath”, as stated in the SiFF motivation.
Paola Bottero, who conceived and wrote the docufilm, explains: «The intent was to restore a human dimension not only to our incredible protagonists, but also to all the people who too often are stripped of their identity and are represented as a problem, a topic to be discussed. There is no problem of migrants or the topic of migration: there is a need to understand in depth the reasons, rights and emotions of those who choose our territories to build a new life. Nyumba’s choral story is a story of welcome, but also of restitution: we too often forget who we are, where we come from and where we have gone. Remembering this was a categorical imperative. In these two months, during the screenings of Nyumba, we have met many people who have deeply understood the meaning of the project. A project of life, of everyday life, of the ability to throw one’s heart beyond the obstacle and build new paths in a region, Calabria, which is represented for what it is. A beautiful, strong, welcoming region, capable of becoming home, nyumba, for anyone who chooses to experience it.”