Cannes Docs has again partnered with eight international institutions and organizations in 2023 to showcase curated selections of docs-in-progress at final stages of post-production and aiming to hit the circuit within a few weeks or months. The showcases are from Scotland, Canada, Scandinavia, Chile, Spain, Italy, Docs by the Sea and CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator.
The showcases of docs-in-progress are primarily designed for decision makers looking for fresh new titles, in particular festival programmers and sales agents. The projects are also generally in search of post-production funding or general gap financing, and sometimes still open to co-production opportunities.
All the showcases are composed of four projects, each presented in the form of a pitch and a 10-minute excerpt of the rough cut. The following synopses are provided by the related institutes and organisations.
SHOWCASE SCOTLAND Friday 19 May – 10:00am – Riviera 2 The presentation is supported by Screen Scotland and the Scottish Documentary Institute which specialises in training, production, and distribution.
The Boy and the Suit of Lights by Inma DE REYES. Prod: Aimara REQUES (Aconite Productions, Scotland), Beth EARL (Rustic Canyon, USA). United Kingdom. Young Borja is growing up in Castellon, a small town in Spain, where the tradition of bullfighting weighs heavily on his shoulders. His grandad, Matias, pins his own unfulfilled dreams of becoming a professional bullfighter onto his grandchild. Like most underprivileged kids in his town, Borja doesn’t see a future beyond orange fields, farming, fishing and bullfighting.
Celluloid Underground by Ehsan KHOSHBAKHT. Prod: Mary BELL, Adam DAWTREY (Bofa Productions, UK). United Kingdom. After the Iranian Revolution, a movie collector in Tehran hid thousands of films to prevent their destruction by the new Islamic regime. Despite arrest and torture, he refused to give up his secret. His story of resistance is told by the boy who became his partner in crime, recollected years later from exile in London. A moving and inspiring autobiography about the subversive power of celluloid dreams.
Loch Ness: They Created a Monster by John MACLAVERTLY. Prod: John ARCHER. Scotland. In the 1970s, beneath the murky waters of Loch Ness, lay a world of violent rivalry, fakes’n’ fraud, sexual shenanigans and monster egos. Cameras peered into the depths – but the real action happened on the banks. The Loch was a natural history frontier – even Attenborough was impressed. Flimsy evidence became scientific fact, frustration turned to fakery – but the deeper you go, the darker it gets.
Tish by Paul SNG. Prod: Jennifer CORCORAN (Freya Films, UK). United Kingdom. Tish Murtha was a photographer whose images of people on the margins of society in Thatcher’s Britain challenged and documented the inequality she herself had suffered. Despite early acclaim Tish was unable to make a living from photography and she died in poverty. Tish’s daughter Ella explores why she did not receive her due and what her work tells us about the value placed on working-class communities.
SHOWCASE CANADA Friday 19 May – 11:45am – Riviera 2 Presented by Telefilm Canada, in partnership with RIDM (Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal).
Asog by Seán DEVLIN 叶 世民. Rod: Amanda ERNST (Beb Bingo Entertainment, Canada).Canada, Philippines. JAYA is a non-binary Filipino comedian who survived Super Typhoon Haiyan but lost their TV career when the storm destroyed the studio where they hosted their local talk show. ASOG follows Jaya on a road trip to a drag pageant and along the way they encounter Filipinos enduring the impacts of climate change, including residents of Sicogon Island whose land was stolen in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.
The Death Tour by Stephan PETERSON, Sonya BALLANTYNE. Prod: Sergeo KIRBY (H2L Productions, Canada). Canada. The Death Tour is a feature documentary following professional wrestlers on “the hardest tour in indie wrestling”. For weeks, these wrestlers travel across frozen lakes to put on shows for Canada’s most remote Indigenous communities. Sleeping on floors and eating canned food, this trip will force each wrestler to draw from their checkered pasts if they dare dream of a future in wrestling.
Mama no himitsu by Laurence LÉVESQUE. Prod: Catherine BOILY (Metafilms, Canada), Rosalie CHICOINE PERREAULT (Metafilms, Canada). Canada. Noriko Oi, a Japanese-Canadian woman, returns to her native land in the hopes of reviving her deceased mother’s memories, a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bomb, while emptying her childhood home. What is left of memories when families’ secrets are locked away and end up casting a shadow over the collective recollections?
The Soldier’s Lagoon by Pablo ALVAREZ MESA. Prod: Pablo ÁLVAREZ MESA. Canada, Colombia. 200 years after Simón Bolívar’s liberation campaign across Colombia, The Soldier’s Lagoon retraces The Liberator’s journey across the high altitude marshlands while searching for glimpses of his ghost still present in this historically contested territory.
SHOWCASE SCANDINAVIA Saturday 20 May – 10:00am – Riviera 2 Scandinavian Films is the umbrella organization for the Danish Film Institute, Finnish Film Foundation, Icelandic Film Center, Norwegian Film Institute and Swedish Film Institute. All projects are in the final stages of production and soon ready to hit markets and festivals.
An Army of Women by Julie Lunde LILLESÆTE. Prod: Natalya SARCH (Differ Media, Norway). Norway, Germany, USA. Two women in Austin, Texas join forces with 13 other survivors to build a movement legally challenging the system that allowed their rapists to walk free. Their groundbreaking class-action lawsuit is the first to argue that sexual assault isn’t prosecuted due to gender discrimination. This is the landmark story of women fighting to hold law enforcement accountable, with resounding relevance worldwide.
I Belong to Nowhere by Kaspar Astrup SCHRÖDER. Prod: Katrine A. SAHLSTRØM, Maria Helga STÜRUP (Good Company Pictures, Denmark). Denmark, Sweden. Set in Japan, the film centers around a mental health chat service started by the 21-year-old student Koki, who himself has felt lonely all his life. “A Place for You” quickly becomes a lifeline in a society where more and more people feel isolated. I Belong to Nowhere follows Koki and a handful of the vulnerable users struggling to find meaning in their lives, who now finally have a place to turn to.
Meril (WT) by Victoria VERSEAU. Prod: Malin HÜBER (HER Film, Sweden), Mathilde RACZYMOW (Les Films du Bilboquet, France). Sweden, France. Having reached her innermost dream, Victoria tries to understand what changed when she went through gender confirmation surgery. After all that struggle, should she not be happy? Instead, her aspirations were placed on hold when Meril, a close trans friend, decided to end her life. Victoria retraces her memories traveling to Chonburi and Paris piecing together the past in order to face the future.
Once Upon a Time in a Forest (WT) by Virpi SUUTARI. Prod: Virpi SUUTARI (Euphoria film oy, Finland). Finland. Once Upon a Time in a Forest is a film about brave young people who are defending one of the last coniferous forest areas in Europe. It is a morality play and a love story of a younger generation whose main object of love is the Finnish forest. This cinematic documentary explores environmental feelings and witnesses how the 22-year old protagonist Ida grows up to be the leader of the new Forest Movement.
SHOWCASE ITALY Saturday 20 May – 11:45am – Riviera 2 The projects are presented by Cinecittà on behalf of the Directorate General for Cinema and Audiovisual of the Ministry of Culture, in collaboration with Doc/it..
Honeydew by Marco BERGONZI, Michael PETROLINI. Prod: Simone CATANIA, Francesca PORTALUPI (Indyca SRL, Italy). Italy, Sweden. Honeydew isn’t just a town it’s a state of mind. Maureen, 60s, moved to the tiny Northern California enclave in her 20s, seeking freedom in its purest form. But her simple life of writing country songs and illegally cultivating weed is disrupted due to the legalization of marijuana. Unable to adapt to government bureaucracy she has no choice but to surrender her corner of paradise to a younger generation.
LUX SANTA by Matteo RUSSO. Prod: Orazio GUARINO (Naffintusi, Italy). Italy. Crotone, the young people of the Rione Fondo Gesù deal with the absence of their fathers. Forced to be husbands for their mothers, every year among the grey buildings, they gather to honor the millenary tradition of the Santa Lucia fire, trying to rediscover their lost adolescence.
Terra Incognita by Enrico MASI. Prod: Stefano MIGLIORE (Caucaso, Italy), Loïs ROCQUE (Les Alchimistes, France). Italy, France. Weaponization of energy and nuclear family life in the wilderness intertwine in Terra Incognita, a documentary feature ode to the search for survival resources on planet earth. Starting from Alexander von Humboldt’s oeuvre Cosmos, made of sketches describing the natural universe, the film is a poetic post-human investigation, in and out of atomic energy, in the modern geopolitical context.
Touché by Martina Moor. Prod: Filippo Macelloni (NANOF, Italy). Belgium. Italo-Brazilian fencing champion Nathalie Moellhausen filmed intimately over 10 years. Three Olympics with two different flags. Challenges, defeats (many) and victories (few). A legendary trainer, a number of dubious mentors, a famous chef as a boyfriend. A distressing relationship with a cumbersome father. A turbulent journey, defined by blind ambition and haunted by demons of failure.
SHOWCASE CHILE Sunday 21 May – 10:00am – Riviera 2 Chiledoc is the Chilean documentary promotion agency, supported by ProChile, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Chilean Documentary Corporation CCDoc.
Relentless Memory by Paula RODRIGUEZ SICKERT. Prod: Paola CASTILLO VILLAGRÁN (Errante Producciones, Chile), Gema JUAREZ ALLEN (Gema Films, Argentina). Chile, Argentina. Margarita, a young Mapuche academic, discovers in an unknown archive in Berlin the testimonies of Mapuche prisoners who were expelled from their territories during the military invasions that founded Argentina and Chile. Moved by the discovery, she embarks on a journey to retrace the deportation routes of her ancestors.
El Menor by Mijael BUSTOS. Prod: Felipe EGAÑA (Los Reyes del Parque, Chile), Diego SALDIVIA (Los Reyes del Parque, Chile). Chile. El Menor is an intimate portrait of Efraín (15), a marginal teenager without family, who in a few months becomes a worldwide phenomenon in freestyle music battles. Efrain faces sudden fame without anyone emotionally close to him. In that loneliness, but surrounded by hundreds of thousands of fans, Efrain begins to gradually disappear behind “El Menor”, his artistic persona.
In The Shadow of Light by Isabel REYES, Ignacia MERINO. Prod: Maria Jose DIAZ (Galgo Storytelling, Chile), Francisca BARRAZA (Funky Films, Chile). Chile. In a small town in Chile, rural life deals with an electricity grid providing power to the rest of the country. A child ventures out among hundreds of transmission towers, transformers, and thermal power stations and giving himself over to chasing rabbits. In the darkness, the threatening presence of the large-scale industrial complex reveals the workings of an unequal system.
Life by Antonio CARO. Prod: Michel TOLEDO (Tótem Producciones, Chile). Chile. Fresia, a young Pewenche girl who has lived all her life in a community that mistrusts Chilean institutions, must gradually move away from her home and territory because she is pregnant. Fresia visits clinics for her maternity check-ups, travels to cities she does not know and finally enters a public hospital, where after a long wait she gives birth to her baby, Dalila, who is born with the cleft palate.
SHOWCASE SPAIN Sunday 21 May – 11:45am – Riviera 2 Presented by ICEX Trade and Investment, along with ICAA Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts, in partnership with ZINEBI – Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and in collaboration with the Gijón International Film Festival (FICX).
A Tree is a Tree by Carlos MARQUES-MARCET, Aleix PLADEMUNT. Prod: Rafa MOLÉS (SUICAfilms, Spain). Spain. Humans are a plague. We are the species with the strongest colonizing longing of our planet. ‘A tree is a tree’ is a journey between the most unspoiled piece of land on the planet and the oldest tree in the world. In the film the images talk to who watches. The spectator is the object. The picture is the subject. A non human voice tells us that what we see is so partial that it barely close to reality.
Itoiz Summer Sessions by Larraitz ZUAZO. Prod: Ainhoa ANDRAKA, Zuri GOIKOETXEA (Doxa Producciones, Spain). Spain. The discovery of some unpublished recordings leads Juan Carlos, leader of ITOIZ, to ponder the dissolution of the band at the height of their success, after having adopted a more accessible pop style which he now disowns. Juan Carlos begins a cathartic journey to the essence of the band, reliving their beginnings in the 70s as a progressive rock group in Mutriku, in an attempt to reconcile with the past.
The Remnants of the Pass by Alfredo PICAZO, Luis SOTO. Prod : José Alberto ANDRÉS LACASTA, Sara Sánchez (Du Cardelin Studio, Spain). Spain. Antonio remembers a Holy Week from his childhood in a remote village in Córdoba. Seven days that turned him into the man he is and the child he cries to be again. A letter from an adult mind, in memory of the past.
A Film By Fernando Ruiz Vergara by Concha BARQUERO, Alejandro ALVARADO. Prod: Sara SÀnchez (Azhar Media, Spain), Alejandro ALVARADO (Alvarquero, Spain). Spain. After his death, Ruiz Vergara left dozens of sketches for films he was unable to make. The filmmaker only directed one film, Rocío, heartbreaking and fascinating, cursed after its judicial censorship in the early years of Spanish democracy. Since then, his projects remained in the imagination. In Um filme by Fernando Ruiz Vergara we take up again the films dreamed by Fernando to film them, from the present.
SHOWCASE DOCS BY THE SEA Monday 22 May – 10:00am – Riviera 2 Docs by the Sea is an international documentary lab and forum based in Bali, Indonesia that champions independent documentary filmmakers from Asia. The projects are presented in partnership with Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute (TFAI), Taiwan Docs and Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA).
A Distant Call by Andrea SUWITO. Prod: Finbar SOMERS (Umbra Motion Picture Company, United Kingdom), Mandy MARAHIMIN (Talamedia, Indonesia), Xavier ROCHER (La Fabrica Nocturna Cinéma, France). Indonesia. In a country that increasingly persecutes LGBTQ+ people, an ancient way of life that recognises five genders survives in a remote village. Their last gender-transcendent leader must make a critical decision: conform and risk their culture’s extinction, or refuse and be ostracised by society.
Island of the Winds by Ya-Ting HSU. Prod: Ya-Ting HSU (Argosy Films and Media Productions, Taiwan), Huang YIN-YU (Moolin Films, Ltd. & Moolin Production, Co., Ltd, Taiwan & Japan), Baptiste BRUNNER (Y.N Productions – La Cuisine aux Images, France). Taiwan, Japan, France. Following the endless and unforgettable fighting of a social movement around a leprosy sanatorium in Taiwan, a lifework of the filmmaker for two decades.
Tens Across the Borders by CHAN Sze-Wei. Prd: Alemberg ANG (Daluyong Studios, Philippines), TAN Si En (Momo Film Co, Singapore), Yasmin RAMS (Perennial Lens, Germany/USA), CHAN Sze-Wei (Oddpuppy Productions, Singapore), Executive Producers – Derren LAWFORD and Daniel KARSLAKE (DARE Pictures, UK). Philippines, Singapore, Germany, UK. We witness three trailblazers of the underground ballroom scenes in Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines as they journey to hold on to their ballroom and birth families, connect with ballroom’s source in New York City, and grow a flourishing queer community across Southeast Asia.
The Tongue of Water by Polen LY. Prod: Lucas SENECAUT (L’OEIL VIF Productions, France), Rithy PANH (ANUPHEAP Productions, Cambodia). France, Cambodia. In Cambodia, Neang, an indigenous mother, tries to rebuild her life after her village is swallowed up by a dam reservoir. Despite pressure from the government and industrialists to leave her ancestral land, she fights to keep her community and family together. Between memories and connection with nature, The Tongue of Water tells the story of her journey of resilience.
SHOWCASE CIRCLE Monday 22 May – 11:45am – Riviera 2 CIRCLE Women Doc Accelerator is an annual training programme for women-identifying documentary filmmakers who are seeking support to develop their films and broaden their professional skills.
Ever Since I Knew Myself by Maka GOGALADZE. Prod: Maka GOGALADZE (Formo, Georgia). Georgia. The daughter of a strict math teacher and high-maintenance mother, Maka embarks on a journey around post-Soviet Georgia to observe children in the process of education. This quest is accompanied by her intimate conversation with mother. Two women of different generations, with different experiences and clashing perspectives but huge love for each other, reflect on parenting and education.
72 hours by Anna SAVCHENKO. Prod: Isabel DE LA SERNA (Playtime films, Belgium), Jean-Marie GIGON (Sanosi Productions, France), Volia CHAJKOUSKAYA (Volia Films, Belarus).Belgium, France. Liubou’s life has been incomplete ever since her son was wrongfully accused, sentenced to death and executed within a year. Sharing her story, she transforms from a grieving mother to a symbol of the struggle against the death penalty in Belarus.
Rebelled by Andrea GAUTIER, Tabatta SALINAS. Prod: Julio TALAMANTES (Perro Rojo, Mexico); Manuel DIAZ, Andrea GAUTIER, Juan GAUTIER (Smiz and Pixel, Spain). Mexico, Spain. 8th of March. All women mobilise against gender violence. In Mexico, a group of women reunite to tell their story; at the end of the seventies, they created the “Cine Mujer” collective and produced films during a 10 year period. A choral portrayal of a generation that now witnesses how the issues they tackled in their documentaries 40 years ago still require urgent action.
Tata/Father by Lina VDOVÎI, Radu CIORNICIUC. Prod: Monica LĂZUREAN-GROGAN (Manifest Film, Romania). Romania, Germany, The Netherlands. A journalist, long estranged from her father for being violent to her as a child, discovers that he’s being beaten by his own employer. When she agrees to help him expose the injustice, will she also be able to heal the pain he caused her?
2023 AWARDS
AJD DOC Award: Al Jazeera Documentary acts as a co-producer with a minimum contribution of $15,000 USD
Docs-in-Progress Award: In partnership with IEFTA – The International Emerging Film Talent Association, endowed with a €10,000 cash prize and professional long term project follow-up by IEFTA
Post-Production Award New!: A €5,000 grant for post-production expenses [with the support of Hiventy]
Alphapanda Award:Endowed with two exclusive consultations on film marketing & social media
Think-Film Impact Award: Consisting of a strategic impact workshop & an impact pitching coaching session
DAE – Documentary Association of Europe Award: Offering one year of free membership to DAE with all benefits for the team and rough cut consultation with one of DAE’s senior advisors.
