RT’s round the clock documentary channel RTDoc has presented hundreds of documentaries and has been recognized by many international industry awards, including the New York Festivals Awards and US International Film & Video Festival Awards, in the five years since its launch.
“The original idea was to focus on producing documentaries about Russia, but the channel has grown to cover the entire world in these 5 years,” says Yekaterina Yakovleva, head of RTDoc. “To-date, we have produced and aired over 500 films. Our teams find one-of-a-kind, absolutely stunning stories all over the world, and run live investigations at the sites of ongoing conflicts, often risking their lives.”
RTDoc crew’s recent trip to Syrian Kurdistan produced two eye-opening documentaries. In the Name of the Profit explores a possible connection between Turkey and the Islamic State; it has been scheduled for screening at the UN later this summer. Her War: Women vs. ISIS tells the story of Kurdish women fighting against the Islamic State militants who fear dying at the hand of a woman.
Other notable RTDoc films about the military conflicts include Trauma, which is dedicated to the work of emergency response doctors in the conflict-torn Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, and Zashto? (Why?), shot 15 years after NATO’s air strikes of Yugoslavia, which documents present-day consequences of that military operation.
Several RTDoc stories captivated the international public with their unexpected and peculiar subjects. Sleepy Hollow followed reports of a Kazakh village whose many residents would occasionally fall into several-days-long sleep. The documentary piqued the interest of the Washington Post, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Week, and other outlets. Meanwhile, Agafia presented to the world a 70-year-old recluse who has lived her entire life cut off from the civilization, hundreds of kilometers deep into the thick forests of Siberia.
RTDoc documentaries have been distinguished with many international awards including New York Festivals Awards, MediaExcellence Awards, OMNI Intermedia Awards, Broadcast Digital Awards, US International Film & Video Festival and Russian film festival Strana. Stand-out works include Blood and Honour, which investigated the story of a centuries-old tradition in the North Caucasus, Albino Africa about the hardships befalling albino children born in Tanzania, The Town of Little Angels, filmed six years after Beslan massacre, and Children of the Tundra, portraying the life of the indigenous population of Russia’s Far North.
(Source: RT press release)