The Barcelona International Documentary Film Festival (DocsBarcelona) has unveiled the titles that will form its 27th edition, which this year renews its structure and “proposes a program to question colonialisms,” write organisers.
The festival will take place from May 2 to 12 and presents 40 feature films and 10 short films, with more than 50 filmmakers invited to attend activities.
The international Docs&Pearls competition will from now on comprise the Official Section of the festival.
Docs&Love is a section of six films dedicated to the different expressions and forms of love, and with the new Docs&Cat section DocsBarcelona “continues to embrace the diversity of perspectives and themes of documentaries made in Catalonia.” The nine Catalan films will compete for a €3000 proize.
“This year’s Docs will be full of discoveries and doors that open to invite us to walk along paths not yet explored, full of questions and tools to unlearn and relearn different ways of thinking and being in the world,” comments Artistic Director, Anna Petrus.
“This very special edition, in which we will discover the nuances and mysteries of real reality, revolves around one of the major concerns that we have detected in a more than significant number of creators: how power relations determine our way of looking at and being in the world,” Petrus adds of the festival’s focus on colonial pasts and women fighters.
“In this sense, the 15 titles in the Docs&Pearls Official Selection (thirteen of them premieres in Spain, and two European premieres) have the point of view, often silenced, of eleven women directors, but also of seven racialized filmmakers and seven who are part of the LGBTIQ+ community,” the festival writes. “Six of the feature films in DocsBarcelona’s main competitive section speak of the colonial gaze and push us to think about both our privileges and the possible ways and paths to decolonization.”
The festival opens May 2 with Agent of Happiness a co-production between Hungary and Bhutan and directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó, which world-premiered at Sundance 2024 and which questions Bhutan’s label as the happiest country on the planet.
French filmmakers Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret will visit Barcelona to receive the Honorary DocsBarcelona Award, which includes a retrospective and public discussion on their work.
Another highlight of this year’s DocsBarcelona will be the visit of Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky, who returns to the festival to present his latest film, Architecton, an epic and poetic meditation on architecture that warns about the devastating impact of cement.
DocsBarcelona will continue to pay attention to younger audiences, with exclusive screenings for schools in the Docs&Teens section, and with a dozen short films in the DOC-U section, the exhibition space for works by university, vocational training and film school students.
On May 11, the festival will announce its list of winners at a gala to be held at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB).
