“The Shockwave”, a documentary of the Beirut port explosion by the journalists reporting platform VICE World News, has won a DuPont-Columbia Award.
Vice World News provides global coverage across many facets, including extremism, climate change, drugs, privacy, politics, and inequality.
The award-winning documentary is seen through the use of harrowing and devastating CCTV footage.
The footage is seen from the standpoint of Saint George’s Hospital, where doctors and nurses tried to save the lives of thousands of wounded people.
“The Shockwave” describes how the August 2020 explosion in Beirut almost destroyed the city’s most famous and oldest hospital and how it affected the doctors and nurses and their heroic venture to save the lives that day.
While receiving the duPont-Columbia Award, the director and producer of the documentary, Paula Neudorf, said: “The courage and humanity seen in this footage stand in stark contrast to the government negligence and corruption that led to that day.”
The DuPont-Columbia Awards was founded by Jessie Ball DuPont in memory of her late husband Alfred I. duPont, an American industrialist, financier, and philanthropist.
The first DuPont Awards event was held 8 years later, in 1942, in the St. Regis hotel in New York. In 1969, the DuPont Awards went to Columbia University and became the duPont-Columbia University Awards.
Each year, it holds the highest standards in journalism by annually honoring winners selected by the DuPont Jury from local television to podcasts, and documentaries.
“The Shockwave” is more than a documentary. It is a historical statement about the heroism of the Lebanese people, and a striking revelation of their “government negligence and corruption” that materialized into a living hellish nightmare on August 4th, 2020.
