News

This week Krakow Film Festival Industry 2024 hosted a presentation of 10 new Polish & Ukrainian documentary projects at the post-production stage, preceded by the Doc Lab Poland: Doc Lab Go workshop. The purpose of the presentation was to source potential distributor, sales agent and buyer interest as well secure a festival premiere and other core slots in the doc calendar.

The deadline for films for the 7th Al Jazeera Balkans Documentary Film Festival has been extended to midnight of June 3 2024, while project submissions for Industry Days (three categories: Main Pitch, Rough Cut, Balkan Stars) can be made up to and including June 15. AJB DOC Film Festival will take place in Sarajevo 13 to 17 September 2024. Industry Days runs September 14-16.

Munich-based sales company Autentic Distribution announced this week a raft of sales with international broadcasters. Most recent of these is a multi-doc deal with Al Jazeera Documentary, coming hot on the heels of a 30-hour package deal with SBS Australia and another eye-catching package deal to Canal+ (Poland) across its various channels.

Beldocs Pitching Forum, the pitch section of Beldocs Industry Days (23-26 May), handed out its awards May 25 during a ceremony presented by the Head of Beldocs Industry, Andrijana Sofranić Šućur. The program is part of the 17th Belgrade International Documentary Film Festival Beldocs, which is ongoing and runs to 29 May.

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.

On May 21, Cannes’ Marché du Film hosted a talk titled “Fighting for the Commons in a Time of Critical Destabilisation.” The event saw the participation of director-producer Raoul Peck and Dominic Asmall Willsdon, IDA’s Executive Director. In particular, Peck zoomed in on his Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (showcased in the Special Screenings strand), and on advocacy, capitalism and how doc production has changed over the last 30 years, among other topics.

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.

Film students around the world will have the opportunity to use images from the work of French filmmaker Agnes Varda (1928-2019) thanks to an extraordinary new project that will make Varda’s rushes available on an online platform. They can then be downloaded and edited in any way the students see fit. “The platform is going to be online in June,” explains Varda’s daughter Rosalie Varda whose family production company Ciné-Tamaris has been shepherding the project.