The award is an initiative of the Doc Alliance network, which brings together seven European documentary film festivals, including DocLisboa, and recognises first works by directors from the European space, being awarded the prized a value of €5,000 for the development of the next project.

According to the jury of this edition of the award, the film is "deeply rooted in the personal universe of the director, while addressing the idea of collective - the particular and the general, the psychic and the non-psychic, appear intertwined in each other, creating a new and immersive reality".

"Ghosts: Long way Home", shown in 2019 at DocLisboa, was distinguished last November at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, where he won the award dedicated to first feature films.

According to the producer, "Ghosts: Long way home" "is a family fable spent in Benedita, municipality of Alcobaça, in which the director Tiago Siopa takes the viewer to meet his family: mother, father, brother and in particular his grandparents, one of them embodiment of the ancestral wisdom of magic and popular spells, which manages to put him in contact with the ghost of his other grandmother, already deceased."

This is "the first professional work" by Tiago Siopa, who, in 2018, won the RTP Award for best project in the post-production phase in the Arché do DocLisboa program, "which amounted to RTP's acquisition of its exhibition rights".

The Doc Alliance network, aimed at supporting independent European documentary cinema, is part of the Doclisboa (Portugal), CPH:DOX (Denmark), Docs Against Gravity (Poland), FID Marseille (France), Jihlava IDFF (Czech Republic), DOK Leipzig (Germany) and Visions du Rèel (Switzerland) festivals.