XiXi, directed by Fan Wu
Biljana Tutorov, Program Director of CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator, explains to Business Doc Europe the association’s raison d’être, its Showcase offer of four docs-in-progress during Cannes Docs 2021 and why specifically it is called a ‘Circle’.
For Program Director Biljana Tutorov, the CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator is more than a training program for women documentary filmmakers who are developing a project of international potential. It is also a vehicle for solidarity and collaboration at which former participants continue to play an ongoing an active role.
“It’s very important to keep the circle alive, to allow participants to be accompanied to the end of the process, and beyond that also to come back to help colleagues working on their films. The idea is to be an active circle of mutual support,” says Tutorov. A further stated aim, as underlined on the Circle website, is ‘to enhance women empowerment, to create a long-lasting network of the women directors and producers…that could help them in their future artistic work.’
“It’s very important to make that clear that we want to be a safe place, where film artists can work through their projects and prepare to present them at the industry events,” continues Tutorov. “In that sense, the choice of project for the Circle in the first place is very much author-related. We try to support a strong author voice through this a la carte approach [whereby] we first select the projects and only then decide who are the mentors for each year.” See participants and experts for the 2021 Circle.
Tutorov explains how the concept of ‘circle’ is equally “symbolic of this approach and methodology” when it comes to the Showcase offering at Cannes Docs, as the projects all hail from alumni of previous programmes. “The four projects are ready to be presented to festival programmers and decision-makers in order to get finance or find partners during their last phase,” she adds.
Croatian director Dalija Dozet’s My Dad’s Lessons is described as a metacinematic portrait of the relationship between a cameraman father (who died suddenly aged just 52) and his director daughter. “The film is made out of a personal archive that she [Dozet] inherited from her late father, who was [an] obsessed amateur filmmaker, and who was teaching her how to look at the world and life through a camera lens since she was a small girl,” comments Tutorov.
The Taiwan project XiXi, directed by Fan Wu (Taiwan), tells of the director’s friendship with XiXi, a Chinese improvisation artist. Through years of video diary exchanges, their friendship became a window to freedom, forcing them to face the ‘vulnerability that comes with the autonomy we never realized we’ve always possessed.’ “It’s also a kind of private personal archive,” observes Tutorov. “She [Fan Wu] documented the friendship with a Chinese friend who was very libertine and who left to live in Europe. And through this turbulent relationship, she is also working on the question of emancipation in far east Asia and on the political backdrop between China and Taiwan.”
Cent’Anni, directed by Maja Doroteja Prelog (Slovenia), is a personal confession about the impact of illness on a relationship as told from the perspective of a caregiver. Filmmaker Prelog follows her partner Blaž, a leukaemia survivor, as he embarks on an extraordinary cycling journey to heal from traumatic experience. “They decided to do the Giro d’Italia on the bike, which is obviously too much of effort for him, so this uphill and downhill is also metaphorical for what they are going through… it’s questioning [their] relationship in different ways.”
The Brazilian project God is a Woman, directed by Bárbara Cunha, concerns the trans-indigenous Afro-American Alexya Salvador, mother of three (including two trans girls) who became the first Latin-America trans reverend at her church. “Her future is uncertain, but through her journey she transforms her community,” explains Tutorov.
CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator will also be active during the July 13 Doc Day with a panel titled ‘Women Doc Filmmakers in the A-List Film Festival Circle.’ The event will include experts closely associated with the organisation: filmmaker Salomé Jashi (Taming the Garden), editor Yaël Bitton (Invisible Demons, Special Screening, Festival de Cannes 2021) and producer Paula Vaccaro (Sumercé, 2019). The panel is moderated by Tutorov.
“We would like to talk about the experience of all our participants? They all have had a strong experience with the big festivals, so we want to hear what it gave them,” says Tutorov. “Is it really so important? In which way did it empower them? How does it influence their confidence or their creative process? And do they think it’s possible to have more documentaries by more female, and female-identifying, filmmakers in big festivals… We talk a lot, but at the end, it’s all always very few names.”
“We think it’s important to think big,” Tutorov adds. “And that’s also the reason for Circle to [attend] Cannes because it’s the biggest feast of cinema. There is something magic about it, and there is this 50:50 initiative that is already there. So we think it’s a good place to bring our participants and to organize exchanges around important topics, because it always resonates more [in Cannes] for some reason.”
