Eight new creative documentary projects from Central and Eastern Europe will be presented at Sarajevo’s CineLink Industry Days on August 13. Over the past 19 years, Docu Talents has served as a key launchpad for docs from the region. The event is organised and curated by the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.
The most promising project will receive the Docu Talent Award, accompanied by a cash prize of $5,000 USD, in co-operation with Current Time TV. The DAFilms.com Distribution Award will cover services valued at €3000 and includes international VOD release on DAFilms.com for two years.
Comments Marek Hovorka, director of the Ji.hlava IDFF: “One for all, or one against all? The protagonists of the presented films are exploring their family roots and cultural background, striving for a fairer and more open world, and trying to secure their own place in it – often in spite of global and political influences. The films…closely and often mercilessly depict the world in which we live and which we are shaping together. In line with tradition, Docu Talents from the East presents formally diverse and thematically significant documentary films at the completion stage made by prominent filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe.”
DOCU TALENTS FROM THE EAST SELECTION 2023
- HAVEL SPEAKING, CAN YOU HEAR ME? by Petr Jančárek. Producer: Jiří Konečný. Production Company: Endorfilm, Czech Republic | 90’. Synopsis: Leaving. And the ever-necessary presence of the playwright, prisoner of conscience, citizen, statesman and a shy director of his own life.
- ROOT by Deniz Čelebić. Producer: Deniz Čelebić, Production Company: Kapiya Production. Bosnia and Herzegovina | Turkey | USA | 50’. Synopsis: As the diary of a woman who carries ancestral memory of displacement from home because of the war, the documentary Root shows her journey of becoming rooted through the garden she cultivated on the land of the Other.
- DREAMING OF EL DORADO by Alan Stanković. Producer: Boris Veličan. Production Company: Event Film Ltd. Croatia | 60’. Synopsis: Film about a young girl Fatima Zahro from Senegal who took her destiny into her own hands and decided to move to Croatia.
- 80 ANGRY JOURNALISTS by András Földes and Anna Kis. Producer: Loránd Balázs Imre. Production Company: filmDOUGH. Hungary | Germany | 80’. Synopsis: Viktor Orbán’s government seizes Hungary’s top independent media outlet, Index.hu. Journalists fight back by resigning and forming a new entity but face familiar toxicity. Can healthy communities survive in a corrupt system? Possible answers are revealed through the lives of three ex-Index.hu employees as they navigate challenges.
- RUNA by Agnieszka Zwiefka. Producers: Zofia Kujawska and Agnieszka Zwiefka. Production Company: Chilli Productions. Poland | 82’. Synopsis: After her mom’s tragic death on the Polish-Belarussian border, a 16-year-old Kurdish girl Runa has to become a mother for her 4 younger brothers as the family deals with trauma and tries to establish a new life in Europe.
- AN ALMOST PERFECT FAMILY by Tudor Platon. Producers: Carla Fotea and Ada Solomon. Production Company: microfilm. Romania | 90’. Synopsis: After 30 years of marriage, my parents announced to me that they were separating. In the midst of this painful process, I was falling in love and starting my own family. The film explores the different shapes that love can take between parents and children and children who become parents.
- CHRONICLE by Martin Kollar. Producers: Ivan Ostrochovský, Albert Malinovský and Katarína Tomková, Production company: Punkchart Films. Slovakia | Czech Republic | 70’. Synopsis: A documentary observation essay creating a portrayal of irretrievably disappearing realities.
- A PICTURE TO REMEMBER by Olga Chernykh. Producer: Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon. Production Company: Real Pictures LLC. Ukraine | France | Germany | 70’. Synopsis: A Picture to Remember is an essayistic account of a family’s long journey through the war. It chronicles the search for a way to handle terrible and recurring losses experienced by three generations of Ukrainian women – those of the director, her mother, and of her grandmother.
The Docu Talents from the East programme is held as part of the Visegrad Accelerator supported by the International Visegrad Fund.
