Ji.hlava 22

What is it like to be young and female and/or queer in this day and age, when social media is part of your daily practice, defines who you are, undermines or boosts your self-confidence? Answers can be found in this atmospheric, sensitive and revealing documentary set in the world of girls on the verge of adulthood.

In her new film Those Who Dance In The Dark which screened in Ji.hlava’s Czech Joy Competition (as well as winning the Best Documentary Feature at the Warsaw Festival), Czech filmmaker Jana Ševčíková looks at the lives of young blind people. As the director acknowledges to BDE, however, her first idea was to make the film about their guide dogs.

The programme offers up 300 films including a unique retrospective of American Oscar-winning avant-gardist Shirley Clarke and the largest ever retrospective of Filipino cinema outside of Asia. The programme will also feature a reflection on the Russian aggression in Ukraine and a conference dedicated to ethics in documentary filmmaking. The 26th Ji.hlava IDFF will take place October 25–30.

A selection of new Czech docs were presented at Ji.hlava IDFF October 26 to a professional audience of festival programmers, sales agents and other interested parties. After the presentation, moderator Diana Tabakov, head of acquisitions at Doc Alliance Films, offered a personal overview of the presentation, and the Czech doc scene in general, to Business Doc Europe.

Between March 6-9 in New York, and March 7-11 in Bucharest, the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival will screen a selection of documentaries from the festival’s 2022 competition sections. The programme in NY includes animation master Jan Švankmajer’s Kunstkamera while the Budapest outing includes Audience Award winner Happily Ever After and Best Czech Doc Kapr Code.

Sixteen titles from 15 countries have been selected for Opus Bonum International Competition of the 26th Ji.hlava IDFF. Eight films will be screened in their world premiere, seven in international premiere and one will have its European premiere at Ji.hlava. The festival also unveils the 5-strong Opus Bonum jury. $10,000 prize for Best World Doc.

Czech filmmaker Victor Portel tells Business Doc Europe about his new doc, screening in International and Czech Joy competitions, concerning Vladimir Dzuro, an ex-Prague detective turned International Criminal Tribunal investigator, whose painstaking research led to the arrest of a notorious war criminal from the former Yugoslavia.

Ukrainian Oksana Moiseniuk’s film captures the outbreak of the Russian aggression, as seen through the eyes of Ukrainians in the Czech Republic. Ji.hlava will highlight the lifetime contribution of Slovak director Dušan Hanák. The fest will also feature masterclasses by Azerbaijani director Hilal Baydarov and Canadian documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal.

In Cisco Kid, world premiering in Ji-hlava Opus Bonum Competition, a solitary young queer person is single-handedly rebuilding a ghost town in Utah. The film looks great. In fact, the whole thing looks more or less how you’d imagine a ghost town would look in frontier times. And to see one person, hammer in hand, trying to revive it is mind-boggling.

Festival boss Marek Hovorka talks to Business Doc Europe on the eve of the 26th Ji.hlava IDFF, which kicks off October 25, running through to October 30. Hovorka describes the leading Czech festival as “a documentary Woodstock.” It may now be 26-years-old but it still has the same freewheeling idealism that characterised the event when it was launched in 1997, he points out.