Millennium Docs Against Gravity has announced that it is open for submissions for its 19th edition, running May 13-22 in cinemas within 8 cities (Warsaw, Wroclaw, Gdynia, Poznan, Katowice, Bydgoszcz, Lublin and now Łódź) before going online May 25-June 5 2022. The deadline for submissions is February 4 2022.
Festival director Artur Liebhart told Business Doc Europe that 134,000 tickets were sold for the last edition of his festival, making it the largest film festival in Poland for the second year in a row. 140 films were programmed in cinemas and 128 films online.
Liebhart also points out that the main competition of the 2021 festival saw a 50/50 parity of male to female directors, while the ratio across the festival as a whole was 55/45 male to female. The competition jury was headed by Agnieszka Holland, President of EFA. The Grand Prix of the festival was awarded to Flee dir. Jonas P. Rasmussen.
On the local front, the Best Polish Film Award went to Bucolic by Karol Pałka while Kuba Mikurda’s Escape to the Silver Globe by Kuba Mikurda picked up both the Studio Cinemas Association Award in the Polish Competition and the Smakjam Polish Competition Prize for the Best Production.
The addition of Łódź as a festival city in 2022 automatically guarantees that the ties between the festival and the city’s film school will be even stronger, Liebhart underlines, with the school hosting producers and filmmakers for a two-day Industry session of screenings, talks and master-classes that will be open to students, professors and public alike. “This move is heavily based on the legendary school’s traditions of bringing industry experts from all over the world,” comments Liebhart.
He further reminds of the festival’s other recent industry innovations. “In 2021 we began co-operating with Wladyslaw Slesicki Film Foundation, which runs the most prominent independent program for Polish documentarians, where we have focused on a segment called Doc Development, which is aimed at film projects in their very early stages and which will be held again during the festival in 2022.”
In 2022, the fest will host workshops for young filmmakers from Belarus, Ukraine and Georgia to be tutored by multi-award winning Polish filmmakers Jacek Bławut and Mirosław Dembiński.
“We are also the co-partners of a Polish project named Jump in the Doc, aimed at developing documentary cinema for children. During the festival we will host a Children’s Documentary Forum which will include industry meetings, workshops and a pitching session, during which the best project will be granted a special award,” he adds.
Additionally, in December 2021, the festival’s VOD service offer to educational establishments will be expanded to stream 70+ “very meticulously curated” docs to schools and colleges, with additional educational materials covering a full range of disciplines from “psychology to politics, from the arts to citizen knowledge.”
Liebhart further stresses that documentary, and especially the type of creative doc that he and his colleagues favour, is meant for the big screen, and that doc festivals should fight tooth and nail to make sure that that is how they are presented, rather than opt for simultaneous online presentation, as he fears some European festivals may be tempted to do. “Sometimes I don’t see any efforts to maintain cinema and the fruit of filmmakers’ work on the big screen,” he stresses.
He points out that Millennium Docs Against Gravity organised a whopping 1355 screenings during its last edition which promoted live screenings first and foremost, before a later online roll-out.
“What we [as documentary festivals collectively] are showing on the big screen is something extremely wonderful and extremely important and extremely eminent and must be watched in cinemas,” he underlines. “But let’s not forget that documentary film festivals are competing every day in the big cities against other arts events.”
He therefore stresses the need not only for the sourcing and programming of great films, but also for “greater advocacy and greater marketing,” as well as the realignment of budgetary resources to address the public-facing imperative to screen great docs in theatres to collective audiences.
