Cannes Docs 2022 kicks off in earnest May 19 with a series of bespoke events, talks, keynotes and project presentations dedicated to all-things documentary.
Matters will culminate June 24 with the annual Doc Day when the project awards are handed out and the makers of some of the outstanding documentaries within the festival programme discuss their work (including doccer Brett Morgan talking about with Moonage Daydream, Ainara Vera on Polaris and Shaunak Sen on the Sundance winner All That Breathes). Doc Day will also feature a discussion with leading director and EFA president Agnieszka Holland and a keynote by Opal H. Bennett of American Documentary/POV.
While all of this is entertaining, educational and highly laudable, Chevit talks of a higher purpose to proceedings. Cannes Docs is there, “philosophically speaking, to advocate for documentary cinema and to work at strengthening its integration within the global film industry,” he says. And across the wider festival structure, Cannes Docs serves to remind programmers of the uniquely creative, inventive and provocative world of documentary. “There’s no direct lobbying, but [we] clearly distill the idea that docs are fantastic,” he says.
Chevit acknowledges that there are bigger doc events within the yearly calendar, “but at the same time we’re literally at the very centre of the world’s number one film festival and market, and that’s a unique feature for sure.”
“And I might add that another interesting characteristic of Cannes Docs is that decision makers will get to meet independent filmmakers that that might not be on their radar from all parts of the world. Filmmakers that might not yet be connected with the international industry…maybe not necessarily aware of all specialized markets and organizations out there, but who actually decide to attend Cannes – well, because it is Cannes. And they’re [thinking] ‘I want to make films’ and in this case, maybe documentary films…They don’t necessarily know about CPH:DOX, or even IDFA or Hot Docs, but they’re thinking, ‘where should this adventure of filmmaking start?’”
Cannes Docs is nevertheless broad in scope, offering up a slew of great new non-fiction works in progress from delegations around the world, including Ukraine and, for the first time this year, Japan. Other countries and organisations presenting documentary projects in progress are Chile, Canada, Scandinavia, New Zealand and CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator, an exclusive training program for female-identifying documentary filmmakers.
Chevit also flags up his new collaboration with Al Jazeera Documentary, which is presenting two works in the Spotlighted Projects section (My Brother Ali by Paula Palacios, Spain/France; and Don’t Let the Sun Go Up on Me by Asmae El Moudir, Morocco/Qatar). What’s more Al Jazeera Documentary will hand out the AJD DOC Award Al Jazeera Documentary, for which the company will board the winning project as a co-producer, with a minimum contribution of $15,000. The other financial prize is the Docs-in-Progress Award, offered in partnership with IEFTA – International Emerging Film Talent Association, which is endowed with a €10,000 cash prize and professional long term project follow-up by IEFTA.
Cannes Docs will be offering more networking opportunities in 2022. “For a program like ours it’s networking that’s most precious here,” Chevit underlines. “That might sound mundane, but it’s not. We’ve added happy hours which didn’t exist before. We’ve added networking lunches, cocktails right after our showcases of docs in progress…We’ve added these because we know they’re extremely precious and useful.”
Chevit also highlights the numerous panels and discussions over the coming days, which include a presentation of ‘HBO Max EMEA’s Original Docs in a Nutshell’ by VP Documentaries Hanka Kastelicová. Sundance-winning director of All That Breathes, Shaunak Sen, will also contribute to the Doc Day appraisal of the recent and extraordinary success of Indian documentary, a debate that will also include contributions form Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh whose Writing With Fire was nominated for the Feature Doc Oscar in 2022. Also on Doc Day is a debate titled ‘Feminist Counterattack’ that will involve directors Simon Depardon and Marie Perennès whose Riposte féministe, about des colleur.euses protest movement, is a Cannes Special Screening in 2022.
The Documentary Association of Europe will host for four debates during Doc Days, ranging from building a career spanning the binary options of fiction and doc, to an assessment of the film market as a safe space, to an interrogation of the sustainability of current forms of collaboration between the African continent and the global north within documentary filmmaking.
Cannes professional attendance numbers in 2022 seem to be nearing (possibly exceeding) pre-Covid levels, but Chevit notes the change that all of us were forced to make to our working habits (not to mention excessive travel schedules and associated “crazy costs”) over the past two years, which is why Cannes Docs remains very open and accessible to online execs.
“We shouldn’t forget one of the things that we learned through these past couple of years, which is that the possibility for filmmakers out there to participate remotely within some of the platforms like Cannes Docs is extremely, extremely precious… At heart we need to keep this kind of online inclusivity,” Chevit concludes.
