Nick Cunningham

The 64th Krakow Film Festival opens May 26 with I Am the Creation of Fiction, Arkadiusz Bartosiak’s portrait of distinguished Polish actor, director, manager and social activist Andrzej Seweryn. The film illustrates a core criterion of the festival’s selection policy, says Kraków FF director Krzysztof Gierat. “We are mostly looking for ‘complete’ works, with an intriguing hero, a fascinating topic, and executed as perfectly as possible,” he says. Krakow Film Festival 2024 runs May 26 to June 2.

The 2024 L’Œil d’or jury comprising Nicolas Philibert, Dyana Gaye, Elise Jalladeau, Francis Legault and Mina Kavani decided to award two films ex aequo. These were Ernest Cole: Lost and Found by Raoul Peck in Special Screenings and Les Filles du Nil by Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir in Critics Week.

The fifteen jury members will assess new works across the International Competition, First Feature Competition, Short Film Competition, The Tim Hetherington Award and International Alternate Realities Competition sections. The festival also announced details of masterclasses and a conversation with revered sound editor Walter Murch. The 31st Sheffield DocFest runs from Wednesday 12 – Monday 17 June.

The family of maverick award-winning documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock announced May 24 the director’s death in New York resulting from cancer complications. Spurlock, who passed away May 23, achieved worldwide recognition following his groundbreaking 2004 documentary Super Size Me, for which he received an Oscar® nomination.

The 2024 Beldocs program hosts 103 films, among which are 13 world, one European, 59 regional and 24 Serbian premieres. Ten films screen in International Competition while a dozen are selected for Serbian Comp. Twenty-three developing projects at different phases of production are selected for Beldocs Industry. The 17th edition of Beldocs opened May 22 with Dragan Jovićević’s Warm Film.

The Christchurch-based Oscar-qualifying docfest announces a “stunning and provocative” line-up of 43 features, 23 shorts and 28 immersive projects. The festival runs 19-30 June before decamping to Wellington and Auckland 3-14 July. The programme will then be shared virtually across New Zealand 15-31 July.

The winners of the Docs-in-Progress Awards were unveiled during a ceremony at the end of this year's Doc Day (May 21). Top cash prizes went to Only on Earth by Robin Petré (IEFTA Doc-in-Progress Award, €10,000), to Aliyá, Yeridá by Rafael Guendelman (Al Jazeera Documentary Award, Co-pro deal with minimum €15,000 contribution), and to Chilean The Stationary Traveller (Rise and Shine Award, €3,000).

Four new projects developed at the CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator were pitched May 20 at Cannes Docs. CIRCLE is described as “a unique training initiative designed for women and non-binary writers, directors, and producers from all-over the world, offering a safe space for consultation, collaboration, sharing ideas and improving skills.” Opening the sessions producer and Programme Director Biljana Tutorov described the workshop as “a work of solidarity,” and a “circle of trust.”

The Dutch filmmaker and Chair of the 10-member fund that aims to address inequities in representation across current international funding systems, talks to BDE ahead of her ‘Soapbox’ key-note at Cannes Docs May 21. After a 3-year pilot, Fund members, which include the likes of the Netherlands Film Fund, Screen Ireland, VAF and Telefilm Canada, are set to sign a new 2-year agreement through to 2026.

In her 40-minute doc, Elena López Riera talks to mature women from Southern Spain, some as old as 103, about their experience of love (or otherwise), marriage and sex. All the time López Riera acknowledges that she will never be one of the numerous brides we see on screen culled from archive, nor will she be part of the “inheritance” process of child-rearing. The film is dedicated to her mother, with whom she has hitherto never been able to talk intimately, and whose image as a young bride herself we see continuously on screen.