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The late Roger Graef OBE, will be posthumously honoured with the prestigious BBC Grierson Trustees' Award during the 2022 British Documentary Awards. Graef’s illustrious filmmaking career spanned six decades and much of his work shone a light on the inner workings of the police and criminal justice system.

Designed to “celebrate the dynamic of European film culture,” the Month of European Film, kicking off 13 November and presented across 35 countries, will comprise “Europe’s own film and award season,” as it celebrates the diversity of European film for four weeks until the grand finale on 10 December with the European Film Awards in Iceland.

Joining December 19 from the BFI’s UK Global Screen Fund, Grundy will be responsible for the fest’s business affairs, partnerships & fundraising, production & operations as well as audience development. The role is a new, joint leadership position and will work collaboratively with Raul Niño Zambrano who has moved into the role of Acting Creative Director.

IDFA 2022 unveiled November 2 its juries across nine competitive sections, including International, Envision, Dutch, Youth, Short and Use of Archive Competitions, as well as Doclab. “Made up of some of the most esteemed names in documentary film, our festival juries are an indispensable part of IDFA and fulfil an honorable role of immense value,” writes the festival.

On 29 October, Ji.hlava IDFF hosted a panel during which European festival directors discussed the boycott of Russian cinematography and other ethical dilemmas. Panelists included Cintia Gil (co-curator of Unidocs’ Artistic Differences), Veton Nurkollari (artistic director of Kosovo’s DokuFest), Viktoria Leshchenko (programme director of Docudays UA) and Marek Hovorka (director of Ji.hlava IDFF).

This makes Netflix the first streamer in the world to have its series and films preserved in the British Film Institute national archive collection. Doc content includes the series Don’t F**k With Cats: Hunting An Internet Killer, Night on Earth and Our Planet. “This is a real milestone for the BFI National Archive and gives us a historical record for audiences in decades to come,” says Arike Oke, BFI Director of Knowledge and Collections.

The final feature of the great Jan Švankmajer had its world premiere at Ji.hlava as a near two-hour director’s cut. This documentary on his idiosyncratic collection of art and other imaginative objects feels like stepping inside the surrealist mind of the illustrious Czech filmmaker – including its darker sides.

Judith Auffray’s ‘07:15 – Blackbird’ wins top Opus Bonum prize. Best debut to Fanie Pelletier’s ‘Bloom’. ‘Kapr Code’ wins main award in Czech Joy. Best Film in Testimonies is ‘Into the Weeds: Dewayne "Lee" Johnson vs Monsanto company’ by Jennifer Baichwal. Otilia Babara’s ‘Love is Not an Orange’ wins Silver Eye Feature Award, given by the Institute of Documentary Film.

Eight project awards were handed out October 28, as well as two festival poster awards. The Ji.hlava New Visions Award 2022 for the most promising European project went to ‘Forest,’ while ‘Recording Mary’ won the Ji.hlava New Visions Award 2022 for the most promising U.S. project. The Silver Eye Award 2022 for Short Docs went to Ukrainian Kateryna Ruzhyna’s ‘Avitaminosis.’

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.