The 30th anniversary edition of Ji.hlava IDFF is set to run October 23 to November 1 and will feature “new documentaries from the Czech Republic and abroad, revelatory retrospectives and the best of experimental cinema,” organisers underline.
“The films presented this year, both in their form and in their subject matter, offer an extremely timely reflection on the phenomena shaping our present,” comments festival director Marek Hovorka. “I am grateful to all the filmmakers who allow us to think about our time without prejudice or ideology, without shortcuts and distortions – simply in new ways. Through their testimony and artistic vision, we as viewers become inventors and explorers of the present. The atmosphere of a film festival further intensifies the shared experience of screenings, discussions and encounters, which in turn become a collective dialogue – or perhaps simply a shared silence – about a rapidly changing and morphing world.”
FILMS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
The anniversary section Films That Changed the World will present films whose impact extended far beyond the cinema. The section comprises thirteen films that succeeded in influencing public debate and transforming it into action, changing legislation or fundamentally altering the way society viewed a particular issue.
These include David Lowe’s Harvest of Shame (1960), Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), Frederick Wiseman’s landmark American documentary Titicut Follies (1967), Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s ground-breaking Minamata: The Victims and Their World (1971), Chris Marker and Mario Marret’s Be Seeing You, and Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988).
“Can films change the world?” asks festival director Hovorka. “We decided to take this question seriously and search across the past century for films that actually managed to do so. They include films that helped free people who had been unjustly imprisoned, led to changes in regulations, contributed to funding for neglected regions or helped change laws. These are not ideological films, but films that stand on the side of ordinary people – individuals, communities and society as a whole.”
THE TRANSPARENT BEING OF TRINH T. MINH-HA
This year, Ji.hlava will also present a retrospective of Trinh T. Minh-ha, one of the most distinctive figures in experimental and essayistic documentary cinema. The Vietnamese-American filmmaker, writer, composer and theorist challenges traditional modes of representing other cultures, women, minorities and documentary reality itself.
The programme will include her directorial debut Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen (1982), one of the seminal works of postcolonial and feminist cinema. Filmed in Senegal, the work deliberately rejects the traditional model of anthropological documentary in which Western filmmakers assume the role of authorities explaining another culture to an audience. Instead, Trinh leaves images, sounds and fragments of everyday life open to multiple interpretations.
Another major work in the retrospective will be Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), in which Trinh Minh-ha uses testimonies by Vietnamese women to examine who tells their stories and what happens to those stories when they are transferred into cinematic images. Here, too, she deliberately disrupts the idea of documentary film as an objective record of reality.
CZECH AND SLOVAK FILMS AT JI.HLAVA
The Czech Joy competition will include Up Again, the new film by director Eliška Cílková, while filmmaker Pavel Štingl’s Jaroslav Seifert: A Rhythm Outside Time returns to the life and work of the Czech poet and the only Czech recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The film arrives in a year marking 125 years since his birth and forty years since his death.
Filip Remunda’s Love Exposed is a personal film about the relationship between Blanka and her father, Vlastimil Kula, a renowned Czech photographer of nudes and erotic imagery whose monograph was published by Taschen. Blanka Kulová edits a film about her father, but instead of a celebratory portrait, an intimate confrontation emerges. The film reveals the tension between artistic self-realisation and responsibility towards loved ones, capturing the fragile process of reconciliation between a father and daughter attempting to understand their shared past.
The Special Screening section will present Retuning by Slovak director Sára Prokopová, recent winner of the Docu Talent from the East Award 2026. The film captures the situation at Slovakia’s public-service television following the arrival of a new political leadership. Against a backdrop of growing political pressure and fears of censorship, it follows employees who decide to defend their profession and the public-service mission.
FAMU 80
Prague’s Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) will also celebrate eight decades of its existence at Ji.hlava. The FAMU 80 selection of films from different periods of the school’s history will show how both the institution itself and the society around it have changed through the work of generations of students.
The programme will include early works by Věra Chytilová, Jiří Menzel, Evald Schorm, Jaromil Jireš, Helena Třeštíková and others, providing not only a cross-section of eighty years of FAMU but also an unusual perspective on Czechoslovak and Czech history through the eyes of several generations of its students.
DAVID WENGROW AT JI.HLAVA IDFF
David Wengrow, co-author of the international bestseller ‘The Dawn of Everything,’ will appear at this year’s Inspiration Forum. He will be joined in Ji.hlava by Samaneh Moafi of Forensic Architecture, climate researcher and comedian Matt Winning, political theorist Camila Vergara and many other guests from the Czech Republic and abroad.
“The Inspiration Forum is taking place this year at an extraordinarily tense moment. In the course of a single summer, we have experienced extreme heat, serious warnings concerning the future development of artificial intelligence, Russia’s continuing war against Ukraine and the associated security tensions in Europe, as well as a flood of testimony about violence and destruction in Gaza. We do not want to look at the world as if it were a film playing out before us while we simply wait to see how it ends. We want to ask what kind of world we humans are creating, what image of it we produce, where power truly resides within it, how we can bear living through this moment – perhaps even with the help of humour – and whether we are still capable of steering the world in a different direction from the one in which it currently appears to be heading,” says Tereza Swadoschová, Head of the Inspiration Forum.
The programme will begin with the theme of the “map” and the question of who decides what is visible, what remains outside the frame and where borders are drawn – from the Mercator projection and the representation of Africa, to digital maps and algorithms.
Samaneh Moafi will demonstrate how a map can also serve as a means of reconstructing reality where it has been contested. Using video footage, satellite imagery, spatial data and 3D models, she reconstructs disputed or obscured events. In Ji.hlava, she will present, among other cases, a reconstruction of an attack on a school in Minab, Iran, and the case of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza.
JI.HLAVA – A CORE HUB FOR FILM PROFESSIONALS
Ji.hlava will once again be a place of intensive encounters among film professionals from around the world. The Ji.hlava Industry programme expects more than 1,200 accredited guests and, over four days, will offer educational activities, networking and hundreds of individual professional meetings.
Among other topics, film-festival representatives will explore new ways of engaging young audiences, while Ji.hlava will also introduce the up-and-coming generation of European documentary producers – Emerging Producers 2027.
The programme will also include a presentation of new film projects from contemporary Montenegrin cinema, this year’s Industry Country in Focus, and a delegation of Polish filmmakers.
“During the four Industry days, alongside an intensive programme, we organise more than 800 individual professional meetings between filmmakers and representatives of festivals, broadcasters, film funds, distribution companies and other film institutions. We often only see the results several years later – in the form of remarkable documentary films,” says Jarmila Outratová, Head of the Ji.hlava IDFF Industry Programme.
Click here for full details of the programme to date. Further selections will be unveiled in the coming weeks.
