The 26th edition of the Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival will screen 300 films, including a retrospective on American Oscar-winning innovator Shirley Clarke, and what fest organizers describe as the largest-ever retrospective of Filipino cinema outside Asia.
The fest, running Oct. 25-30, will include work on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a conference on ethics in documentary filmmaking.
Some 95 films are world premieres, 33 are international bows and six are European firsts.
Films include what fest director Marek Hovorka calls one of the earliest known feature-length documentaries, shot in the Philippines in 1913. “Native Life in the Philippines” by Dean C. Worcester will screen alongside 40 other Filipino works spanning a wide variety of genres and formats. Some, including “Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan,” a U.S. war doc produced by the Edison Manufacturing Co., date back to the American invasion of the islands.
At the other end of the historical spectrum, the short “Even If Cities Would Vanish, We Will Remain” by J.T. Trinidad considers Manila at night as an experimental landscape in which the contradictory elements of city living collide.
The New Visions section, meanwhile, will build on an initiative launched last year that brings American indie doc makers into contact with European nonfiction players, including producers and sales agents. In addition to showcasing outstanding upcoming U.S. docs to European industry figures, New Visions aims to encourage co-productions and wider distribution, and grants a $7,000 award to the most promising American project, in cooperation with AmDocs.
Filmmakers behind the selected U.S. projects also gain online classes with experts who provide an overview of the European film distribution system, financing, festivals and more.
Ji.hlava’s Ukraine focus this year is in the tradition of the fest’s history of embracing current, relevant work, says Hovorka. “Ukraine has been aggressively attacked and we express our solidarity with our Ukrainian colleagues. At this moment we need to help them as much as possible, both morally and financially,” he adds.
Noting that funds Ji.hlava makes from the sale of accreditations will support the Docudays UA festival, which helps Ukrainian filmmakers, Hovorka says the Russian war on Ukraine will also be the focus of discussions at the Inspiration Forum, the fest’s series of live talks.
The Notes on War section will screen “essential documentaries about war made after 1945,” Hovorka says. “With our new experience, the presence of the war and the issue of possible nuclear attacks, we perceive these films with a new intensity.”
“Documentaries allow us to rethink the complex issues of the day, to ask questions and not to succumb to stereotypes. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this is all the more important because it is a real milestone in the history of the 21st century. The rules that have been built up for decades have ceased to apply,” he says.
One goal of the Ukrainian focus, he says, is to take on the issue of war fatigue, noting that “the longer the conflict lasts, the more solidarity may wane. That is why the current shared experience is so essential — suddenly, the war has real faces and concrete details, it is understandable and credible.”
The fest’s Czech Joy section, the focus of local documentarians, features groundbreaking work this year, including the first VR entry, “Darkening,” a short by Ondřej Moravec, billed as a “visually arresting interactive exploration of a space that represents the recesses of the mind and soul, lost in the dips of depressive and anxious states.”
The autobiographical narrative comprises fragments of stories and descriptions of inner turmoil, with what the fest calls “sometimes illustrative, sometimes metaphorical animations and ingenious sound design to understand the causes and experience of depression, the struggle to break out of its darkness, and the feelings of futility and heaviness.”
Moravec, a VR specialist for Czech film festivals and former program director of the One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, came up through the pubcaster Czech Television’s news department.
The fest, which has always screened a wide variety of films that push the boundaries of the doc genre, remains dedicated to exploring the overlap of fiction and nonfiction film, say organizers.
A retrospective of work by Lionel Rogosin, a key figure of American documentary and independent cinema, embraces that goal, considering his socially engaged work, which formed “the antithesis of the Hollywood conformism of the 1960s and 1970s.”
Six Rogosin films will screen, including “Come Back, Africa,” a striking 1959 look at apartheid that caused a sensation at the Venice Film Festival. A film by Rogosin’s son, Michael, “Imagine Peace,” is a 2019 study of the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis seeking peace in the Middle East.