DocsBarcelona 24

The big winner was Adelina by Aurela Berila which won both the DocsBarcelona Project Award and the HBO Max Best Pitch Award, as well as the San Sebastian Lau Haizetara Award. Dolya Gavanski’s Confessions of a Female Gamer picked up two prizes; the East Doc Platform Award and the Artist-in-Residency Program Award (Jacob Burns Film Center & Women Make Movies. All awards…

Additionally the Docs&Cat jury awarded Casa Reynal by Laia Manresa as Best Catalonian doc. “In this 27th edition, we increased by 60% the number of spectators in the cinemas, which reinforces not only the interest of Barcelona's audiences in documentaries but also the local and international creative effervescence of filmmakers who work with reality,” said Artistic Director Anna Petrus.

The archive-based portrait of Roberto Rossellini promises to tell the Italian master’s story and in the process ‘debunk the clichés surrounding the myth’. “For those who love cinema, Rossellini is the genius of great masterpieces, such as Rome, Open City. For those who love great stories, he is the man of scandalous love affairs. He is a fascinating personality, where life and art merge. [This film] is a biopic that can fascinate a wide audience,” producer/director Raffaela Brunetti tells Business Doc Europe.

Three Catalan documentaries will compete in the Official Section of the DocsBarcelona 2024 International Documentary Film Festival, and nine more will compete in the new Docs&Cat section. A total of twelve titles make up the DocsBarcelona's “firmest commitment to the Catalan creative talent and industry, with which the event vindicates the particular look that Catalan cinema dedicates to the documentary genre,” write organisers.

The Docs&Pearls Official Section, featuring 15 films, also addresses other contemporary debates such as the dangers of the digital world and the empowerment of women. “This year's Docs will be full of discoveries and doors that open to invite us to walk along paths not yet explored, full of questions and tools to unlearn and relearn different ways of thinking and being in the world," comments Artistic Director, Anna Petrus.

Catalan Meri Collazos Solà’s passionate, thoughtful and deeply heartfelt documentary tackles medical and societal attitudes toward poor urban air quality, and more specifically how it impacted on her when she discovered her newborn daughter's genetic vulnerability to respiratory illness. The film world-premiered May 9 at DocsBarcelona.

Chilean producer María José Díaz discusses her mixed reality mindfulness project, inspired by the native forests of southern Chile. “The experience [enables] the user to transform their daily life space, like their home or office, into a cosy cabin in a remote place called Cañón del Blanco, a mountain landscape with native temperate forests rich in biodiversity and the presence of millenary trees,” she tells Business Doc Europe.

The professional market of the 27th DocsBarcelona International Documentary Film Festival will run May 6-10. Projects are selected across the Public Pitch, Speed Meetings, Rough Cut and New Tech Pitch sections and participants within each section will present to a panel of international decision makers, funders and distributors. The DocsBarcelona festival runs May 2-12.

Several awards to be given to the best projects selected across the various Forum funding activities (Public Pitch, Rough Cut Pitch, New Tech Pitch and Speed Meetings) during the 27th edition of the festival. Professional activities, including the inaugural Tech Pitch, will take place May 6-10 May. The deadline for project registration is January 29.

My Sextortion Diary may only be just over an hour in length, but it is a powerful and provocative real-life story, prescient in reflecting the unhappy reality facing those people who are forced to deal with the awful behaviour of unscrupulous hackers, and handled in moving matter-of-fact style by Spanish filmmaker Patricia Franquesa as she recounts the terrible ordeal she had to suffer.