RTD's Dying Alone and Syrian Tango win Gold and Bronze at New York Festivals Awards

Two RTD documentaries won awards at the New York Festivals 2020 TV & Film Awards on 20 April 2020. Dying Alone won Gold in the Human Concerns category, while Syrian Tango won Bronze in the Arts category. Four other RTD films were finalists in the competition.

An international panel of industry professionals judges the New York Festivals TV & Film Awards. This year, there were entries from over 50 countries.

Dying Alone, by Artyom Vorobey and Artyom Somov, has also proved a hit with viewers, gaining more than 1.4 million views on YouTube. The film looks at kodokushi, that is the "lonely death" of Japan's elderly population, through the eyes of a cleaner who specialises in clearing the apartments of people of have died at home and seeks to honour these forgotten elders.

In Syrian Tango, writer and director Natalya Karachkova visits soldiers on a forgotten frontline of the Syrian war: the artists fighting for the human spirit through street dance, sculpting underground tunnels or directing a jazz orchestra.

Pas-de-Brazil  by Ekaterina Kozhakina was a finalist in the Cultural Issues category. The documentary shows how the lives of some of Brazil's poorest children change when they join the Bolshoi Ballet School in Joinville, Santa Catarina state, in the south of the country.

Machete Boys of Congo was a finalist in the Community Portraits category. The film, by Alexey Shabarov and Andrey Molodykh, follows a gang of Kulunas, troubled teens who terrorise the residents of Matadi in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Reaping Divine Justice, a finalist in the Human Rights category, Mikhail Barynin and Konstantin Rozhkov hear both sides of the argument in the traumatic stand-off over the issue of the expropriation of Afrikaner farmers' land without compensation by the South African government.

The Coca Trap, a Current Affairs category finalist, travels to Colombia. There, director Artyom Somov finds out why coca farmers find it hard to give up their traditional crop.