The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) is supporting, for the first time, the Healthy Workplaces Film Award for the best documentary on work-related topics. The award is endowed with e8,000 and is presented at the 52nd International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film (DOK Leipzig).

Jukka Takala, director of EU-OSHA, emphasises the importance of making Europe a safer, healthier and more productive place to work: “Every year in the European Union millions of people are injured or have their health seriously harmed in the workplace. It is our mission to promote a culture of risk prevention. For that reason, I fully support the Healthy Workplaces Film Award which brings awareness to this important topic.”

The film award honours a documentary film that focuses on the human being in a changing world of work.

What are the physical and psychosocial outcomes of the economic transition? What happens to the people who are not able to keep pace with our working world? How are workers’ rights affected by a globalised economy? How can the world deal with increasing numbers of migrant workers?

The films nominated for the Healthy Workplaces Film Award are picked from the approximately 1,800 documentaries submitted to DOK Leipzig every year. The festival stands for films dedicated to peace and the dignity of mankind, states festival director, Claas Danielsen, who welcomes the EU-OSHA award: “According to its tradition DOK Leipzig is strongly interested in socially relevant issues. Therefore ‘work’ as a topic has always been on our agenda. In our rapidly changing globalised world work-related issues are an important subject for many filmmakers today. I am glad that the EU-OSHA award gives DOK Leipzig the chance to support documentary filmmaking in an important field of social discourse.”