Lesia Diak, dir/prod of Dad’s Lullaby, winner of the Docu Talent Award 2022 (Credit: Ji.hlava IDFF)
Nine Docu Talents from the East projects from Central and Eastern Europe, planned for theatrical release during the upcoming 12 months, were presented 15 August as part of CineLink Industry Days at the Sarajevo Film Festival.
The Docu Talent Award for the most promising project was given to the Ukrainian Dad’s Lullaby, directed and produced by Lesia Diak. The award is accompanied with a financial prize 5,000 USD, in cooperation with the festival’s partner Current Time TV. The jury described the project as “a heartfelt depiction of a life under impossible circumstances. Such a personal story is a valuable way to understand the scars of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.”
The €3,000 in-kind DAFilms.com Distribution Award was awarded to an archive-constructed film about unofficial history told from the women’s perspective Between Revolutions by Romanian director Vlad Petri and produced by Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan. The award covers international VOD release on DAFilms.com (including Americas, Europe, Asia) for two years. Jury citation: “A true international co-production, it uses a unique method of letter-reading to express a friendship that survives revolutions, regimes and time itself; and has relevance to a world that needs female solidarity as much as ever today.”
“All of the selected films do not only explore the phenomena of our day-and-age, but also ask questions about how our choices shape our own future – whether as an individual, a particular social group or an entire society,” says Marek Hovorka, director of the Ji.hlava IDFF.
The festival underlines how Docu Talents, curated by the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival since 2005, has been a launch pad for a number of documentaries by both renowned and emerging directors such as Laila Pakalniņa, Vladimir Mansky, Bartek Konopka, Piotr Stasik, Peter Kerekes, Dmitrii Kalashnikov and Helena Třeštíková. Films presented at Docu Talents in the past had world and international premieres at major film festivals including in Cannes, Berlin, Locarno, Rotterdam and Sundance.
Projects from Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine made it to the final selection of Docu Talents from the East 2022.
East West Index 2022
Ji.hlava IDFF also presented its annual survey of key European documentary film festivals, focusing on figures representing individual regions. The festival has been conducting the annual survey since 2019. A key finding in 2022 id that less than 15% of European films programmed at Western Europe film festivals are from the east of the continent.
The survey also reveals how most festivals have adopted a hybrid format in the past twelve months. The European documentary festivals are slowly returning to more titles being screened, so the 2020 slump – caused by the pandemic – is fortunately not a permanent state of affairs. On the other hand, only three festivals screened more films in their most recent edition than in the pre-pandemic year of 2019.
However, the representation of Eastern European films in Western Europe and vice versa remains very unbalanced, the festival underlines.
“While Eastern European festivals screen almost half of the European films produced in Western Europe, the reverse is only 15% – less than one in six European films screened by Western European festivals is from the Eastern European region,”, comments Marek Hovorka. Read the survey in full here
Emerging Producers 2023 announced
During the event, Ji.hlava IDFF also revealed the names of the Emerging Producers 2023, the programme that aims at promoting talented European documentary film producers, providing them with a range of networking, educational and promotional support throughout the year. Seventeen European producers will be accompanied by a producer from Qatar, which is the guest country of the 2023 Emerging Producers programme. The Emerging Producers p
rogramme will consists of two workshops – taking place in Jihlava in October 2022 and at Berlinale 2023.
