The 27th Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries (Baltic Sea Docs is set to run September 3rd to 10th in Riga, Latvia. The Forum will feature presentations of 24 film projects, an industry event programme, as well as a programme of film screenings tailored for local audiences in Riga and multiple regional towns in Latvia.
The film project selection this year represents film studios from 11 countries, including Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, and Georgia. 20 projects will be pitched in Riga for the first time and four projects in the new ‘Coming Soon’ session will be returning to the Forum to present their films now in post-production stage.
Prior to the pitches, the new project teams will refine their presentations in a training workshop facilitated by a team of international industry experts that includes documentary film consultant Tue Steen Müller and documentary developer Mikael Opstrup (Denmark), film directors Salomé Jashi (Georgia), Alisa Kovalenko (Ukraine) and Emma Davie (Scotland), film editor Phil Jandaly (Sweden), and producer Simon Kilmurry (USA).
In Riga, where the Baltic Sea Docs pitching sessions are scheduled for September 7-8, the projects will be presented to a panel of decision-makers representing TV channels, such as BBC (UK), YLE (Finland), NHK (Japan), Current Time TV (USA), ZDF/Arte (Germany), sales and distribution companies including Rise and Shine (Germany), Lightdox (Switzerland), filmdelights (Austria), Cat&Docs (France), Taskovski Films (UK), as well as festival and industry event representatives from Berlinale, IDFA, Visions du Reel and One World Film Festival, among others.
Several awards will be presented to the Forum participants. Baltic Sea Docs will continue collaborating with Current Time TV which will present a cash award of €2000 to one of the participating projects. Another partner of the Forum, the BB Post House, will offer an award of post-production services to the value of €3000. For the first time, and over the next two years, the Forum will present the IDFA Spotlight award, which includes participation, travel, and accommodation for a director who will be invited to the next edition of IDFA and participate in a tailored program within the IDFA Industry and training activities. Also, for the first year, Baltic Sea Docs will partner with Helsinki Human Rights Foundation which will offer an award of €2500 to cover expenses on a project’s realization. Finally, the Baltic Sea Docs award will offer one producer and one director carte blanche opportunity to pitch their future project at a later edition of Baltic Sea Docs.
Aside from the pitches, this year’s Forum will also host Travelling Docs, an activity organized by the Creative Europe MEDIA desks and which is presented at a different documentary event every year, “motivating European documentary producers to cooperate.” The September 6 ‘Travelling Docs. Share Your Stories,’ event will be a networking activity for Baltic, Ukrainian and other European documentary producers with the aim to facilitate CE MEDIA Co-development projects. The event will be delivered to the Baltic Sea Docs by 11 Creative Europe Desks (Berlin, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hamburg, Latvia, Lithuania, Munich, NRW, Poland, Sweden) from eight countries, incorporating 16 documentary producers.
On the same date, September 6, the Creative Europe MEDIA Desks will offer a seminar with a key-note by the author and curator Barbara Wurm, the head of the Berlinale Forum, on the phenomenon of a documentary approach within fiction films. The seminar will cover two case studies: January by the Latvian director Viesturs Kairish on using documentary footage and adapting the way the fiction elements are shot; and a work in progress from Germany, NRW – The Return of the Projectionist by writer/director Orkhan Aghazadeh and inspired by a real story and with some of the actual individuals playing the characters in the film. Producer Carl-Ludwig Rettinger will be on hand in Riga to share details on how the real story influenced the production of the fiction film.
In parallel to the industry events, the Baltic Sea Docs film programme will open September 5 with Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies (2023) that examines the downing of Malaysia Airlines MH17 flight in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. The film programme will also feature the Donbas teenage group portrait We Will Not Fade Away (2023) by Alisa Kovalenko, Erik Gandini’s After Work (2023) on the future of employment, the archive based poetic film Between Revolutions (2023) directed by Vlad Petri, among other titles.
The programme will also feature a presentation of the EC campaign ‘Education, no matter what,’ whose aim is to raise awareness of the importance of education in emergencies. The event will include a screening of the Ukrainian short film When I Grow Up, directed by Claire Billet and Olivier Jobard.
