Month: February 2026

Originally from northern France, Rislane Hakym places social issues at the heart of her practice. She has been a jury member at international festivals. With a background in audiovisual and journalism, she directs film projects with marginalised people. Her interest in documentary filmmaking led her to enrol in the CREADOC Master’s programme in 2023. There, she was able to experiment with sound creation, notably with her documentary Schizophonies, which won an award at the 2024 Phonurgia Nova Awards and was featured at the 2025 EBU Audio Storytelling Festival in Lithuania. Her journey into cinema of the real continues with the DEMC documentary Master’s (Paris Cité University).

Born in 1950, Henriette Rasmussen lived in Nuuk, Greenland. She worked at KNR (Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation) in the 1970’s before entering politics where she served as cultural minister between 1991 and 2005. From 1993 she was involved with the UN, where she was a key figure in promoting the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, an agreement which was adopted in Greenland in 1992. As well as one of the central forces behind the creation of a permanent UN group for indigenous peoples. A member of the Earth Charter Commission, she also helped to create a global plan for the environment. She returned to KNR in 2008 where she was a familiar voice on the air until her death in 2017.

A Circle of Men was produced by Henriette Rasmussen with Rikke Houd and mixed by Rikke Houd. It was featured at the Prix Europa in 2009.

Created as part of RANA/Radiophonic Narration, an 18 month-long practice based education in sound narrative and radio feature making, aimed at professionals working from remote and small societies in the north. The course ran from 2007-9, taught in Iceland, Greenland, Sweden and Denmark by a range of international feature-makers, sound artists, journalists, composers and anthropologists. The project was run by the Icelandic Filmschool and managed by Rikke Houd.

In October 1998, Henriette wrote about sound, storytelling and her culture for Le Cercle Polaire – a think tank working to encourage the preservation of the polar environments.

“As an 8 year old in 1958, I remember my hometown hosted the visit of a delegation from Canadian Inuit. Since the migrations over several thousand years, this was the first time in modern times we Greenlanders saw and met Canadian Inuit. Their parkas became fashionable later, and we could understand their dialect. We also learned that they enjoyed listening to our radio. Old villages have been recovered in Disco Bay, my native area. Stories are told about events in these villages, passed on orally to ears eager to listen on the long and lonely winter nights, through the last 4,000 years. Many of these stories were collected and written down when we Greenlanders got our first writing system in the mid-19th century. Our culture was sustainable, we used the entire product of whatever catch, leaving only the broken bones since the marrow was valuable oil for food or fuel. So when we say archaeological evidence we mean materials in stones, bones and old ivory. Recently I heard a radio documentary in which it is said that in our culture a great hunter who arrived to the community with a catch would, at the end of the day, have the same amount of food in his house as those who did not catch anything that day. That is also what we remember life was like. No one became rich, but nothing was wasted. Wealth was measured as in terms of your generosity, and respect was due to your skills as a hunter, and what it means to be a kayaker, to your physical strength or your talent as a seamstress for making clothes and boats for survival in the Arctic lands and seas. Or as a shaman with great knowledge, a storyteller, or a poet who could amuse others at our gatherings, women and men alike. We, the Inuit, still have one leg in our old culture and the other in the fast lane. Our language will survive climate change but the customary laws and skills related to our envi­ronment are being forgotten. For the world community, our culture, based on sharing not wasting, storytelling and poetry is important for the survival of human cultural diversity and is to be viewed as a good practice of sus­tainable development.”

“What I do is writing with a microphone. Our lexicon is the sound material we shape. We use speech, not language. All these terms: documentary radio drama, radio feature, acoustic film—are not quite appropriate. It is, in fact, radio itself… Documentary radio drama uses the means of the medium itself.” (Zvonimir Bajsić in an interview)

Created in collaboration with dramaturg Čedo Prica and sound engineer Maksim Jurjević, ‘Old Lika Pathetic Symphony’ represents the culmination of Zvonimir Bajsić’s exploration of the possibilities of documentary sound on the radio. The piece was recorded in the Plitvice Lakes National Park during the winter of 1974/75 using a Nagra tape recorder, which at the time weighed 8-10 kilograms.

The programme was first presented at the 19th Radio Week in Ohrid (Macedonia) in 1975, where twenty-seven representatives from countries including Turkey, Syria, Tunisia, France and Germany had gathered. It was awarded best radio feature, with a jury statement that read, “The delegates found themselves simultaneously in front of a truly acoustic and dramatic composition, in front of something that must be called a RADIOPHONIC ART WORK. Old Lika Pathetic Symphony is about life and death, and it confirms that radiophonic expression is not based solely on the word, but also belongs to the world of sounds.”

The work was broadcast worldwide, on Sender Freies Berlin (German adaptation by Klaus Lindemann, 1992), as well as on Swedish radio, Danish radio (adaptation by Viggo Klausen), Dutch, Belgian and Swiss radio. The German adaptation of Old Lika Pathetic Symphony was nominated for the Karl Sczuka Prize (a festival organised by SWR Baden-Baden). The piece was also honoured at the 30th anniversary of the International Features Conference in Sydney in 2004.

Translation: Pavlica Bajsić and Marta Medvešek
Thanks to Croatian Radio for providing the recording.

Zvonimir Bajsić (1925–1987) was a writer and director for radio, theatre, and television from Zagreb, Croatia. He spent his entire professional career in the Drama Department of Radio Zagreb, but his radio dramas and documentary radio features were translated worldwide into an extraordinary number of languages, and he himself collaborated, as both author and director, with numerous foreign radio stations. In addition to being one of most internationally awarded radio authors from the countries of the former Yugoslavia, his name is closely associated with the concept of the documentary radio feature, or—as he himself put it—“writing with a microphone.” This includes his insistence on the sound engineer as an equal member of the authorial team, and in his beautiful reflections on silence as a material of radio (The synopsis for the sound essay Silence (1978), Images from the Life of a Radio Dramaturg (1987)).

More about his work can be found in the book Silence and Other Works (Tišina i ostala djela, 2017), a collection of his works and accompanying texts edited by his daughter Pavlica Bajsić. German translations of his works can be found in the audio archive of Bauhaus University (Department of Experimental Radio), and in the rbb audio archive. A documentary film on his work, ‘Tko je taj Zvonimir Bajsić?’ can be found on YouTube.