The Dan David Prize is the world’s largest history prize. Every year it names nine early- and mid-career scholars, and every year since 2024 we have made a film for each of them — shown at the ceremony, and published to the Prize’s audience afterwards.
Nine scholars, in one production year. A bioarchaeologist reading Viking bone chemistry; a historian of Kongo Christianity; an archaeologist of West African glass beadmaking; a historian of the yellow-fever economy of New Orleans. Each is awarded a film of a few minutes. Hundreds of guests in the hall will see it for the first time, and it has to hold up to the scholar whose life’s work it tells.
Each film begins with reading the paper, not a summary: the research itself, the book, the data, the excavation reports. Each laureate chooses the story from their work that they want the film to tell, and we write the script around it, from inside the source. We understand it in depth before anything is drawn. That is the only way the film works.
Some studios have one distinct animation style. Our approach is different: a film should be made as a derivative of the material its subject is made of. Each of our films takes a different approach to a different subject, because we want each one to be as singular as the world its research is about.
So the film for Daniel Jütte, on the people who set out to destroy the stained glass in churches, is built in dialogue with glass. The film for Abidemi Babalola, on the Yoruba beadmakers who made their own glass beads, is made from beads. Max Bergholz’s, on an uncatalogued archive in a Bosnian basement, is built entirely out of paper: the corridors, the figures, the hand that opens the folder. We have written about this at length.
Each film has two halves. The first is shot: the laureate, interviewed on camera, in a studio, by the same small crew every year. The second is built here, around that interview. And then the finished film is shown once, in a room the Foundation has spent a year preparing, to the people it was made for — before it goes out to everyone else.
Photographs: Guy Yechiely, courtesy of Faza, producers of the Dan David Prize events since 2022.
Three years in, the edition is the clearest demonstration of how the studio works: a standing team, the director in every script review, an original score by Eitan Shefer on every film, and a schedule built so that nine films a year can each be treated as though it were the only one.