Armenian filmmaker and documentarian Artavazd Peleshyan received the Contribution to World Cinema Award at the 19th annual Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in Czech Republic.

“It is a great honor for me to receive this award, and I’d like to thank the festival and the city of Jihlava,” Peleshyan said.

The Festival kicked off on October 27, and will run through November 1.

Peleshyan is known for developing a style of cinematographic perspective known as distance montage, combining perception of depth with oncoming entities, such as running packs of antelope or hordes of humans. He has always made extensive use of archive footage, mixed in with his own shots, with fast inter-cutting between the two. Telephoto lenses are often used to get "candid camera" shots of people engaging in mundane tasks.

As filmmaker Sergei Parajanov used to say, Peleshyan is “one of the few authentic geniuses in the world of cinema.”