The 17th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival goes online 10-22 November with a programme of 50 films from 39 countries. The programme includes international and debut/student competitions and, for the first time, a Hungarian documentary competition.
Like the audiences who have attended the Verzió documentary film festival year on year (although 2020 is, as we know, somewhat of an aberration), event director Oksana Sarkisova is curious.
What happens to our viewing habits as our time is increasingly spent online, she wants to know. How can Verzió 17 create a shared experience, a sense of community, a feeling of belonging? Will viewers be motivated to watch complex visual works rather than easily digestible infotainment? Will they ask questions and find time to debate global issues while struggling with increasing existential pressures and insecurities? Can her festival create an audience out of individual, atomized viewers?
“Our experience is that our audience is extremely interested in getting to know the world in all of its variety and diversity and complexity,” is her answer to BDE, and one which complements her online statement that “human curiosity and compassion is unstoppable, and the […] desire to learn about the world cannot be restricted by physical limitations.”
Verzió 2020 is more compact than in previous years and offers up three competition programmes, including the new Hungarian Competition, as well as three themed programmes (In the Name of Justice, Archive of the Planet and Anthropocene). The opening film is the timely 76 Days (Hao Wu, Weixi Chen and anonymous) about the 76-day lockdown in Wuhan that commenced 23 January 2020.
“Our programme is extremely diverse,” underlines director Sarkisova. “We are a human rights documentary film festival but it in very broad terms, because in order to understand and value human rights you have to realise how complex the world is and how different practices and norms are in different parts of this world. So if you look at our programme, from year one we have been programming very diverse films, not only visually diverse but also thematically and geographically diverse, and I think that also is something that motivates the audience.”
Thirty-nine countries are represented in a festival programme which throws up some of 2019/2020’s most celebrated international documentaries, such Hubert Sauper’s Epicentro, Ai Weiwei’s Vivos and Sandra Bereends’ They Call Me Babu.
Sarkisova reserves special mention for two films in the Anthropocene section which analyses “the human imprint on the world”.
“I Am Greta is really a very powerful film because of the fact that Nathan Grossman started filming very early, and that makes it very special. If he had gone after her [Greta Thunberg] after she was already a media star, it would have been a very different relationship and a very different film,” Sarkisova says.
She further describes Hye-Ryeong Park’s The Wandering Chef, about a world famous chef who also cooks for the elderly in remote regions, as “an incredibly powerful, sensitive and very emotional film. It tells you not about the destruction of the environment, but how to live in harmony with it.”
The Hungarian Competition comprises eight films made up of features, mid-length and shorts. “It’s not the length that brings the victory to the filmmaker,” points out Sarkisova. The selection ranges from Judit Oláh’s celebrated feature-length Return to Epipo (CPH:DOX, Sarajevo 2020), about disturbing and conflicting experiences at a Hungarian summer camp in the 1980s, to István Gábor Takács and Lili Rontó’s 30-minute animated Kostya Proletarsky, about the torture and death of a HIV activist in a St Petersburg Hospital.
“This year’s selection lures us not with topicalities, but with stories that have been filtered through time, giving them a wider, at times eternal, meaning,” comments György Báron, Curator of the Hungarian Competition.
From an industry perspective, the festival will present DocPro, a series
of masterclasses and discussions, including panels entitled ‘Female Power in Documentaries East/West’ and ‘Surviving Pandemia: Festivals and the Global Challenge’.
DocPro is organised in collaboration with Madoke, the new Hungarian association of documentary filmmakers. “[Madoke] was established with this purpose of uniting all people working in the creative documentary industry to collectively put forward their suggestions and their claims in how to make the documentary finance better,” says Sarkisova.
“We give them the platform to voice their ideas on how to reform the financing so it would not be dominated by television projects, and would give a sustainable way for creative documentaries to be produced, and not limited to one or two films per year.”
