Against Gravity has acquired all Polish rights (including theatrical) for Andrea Arnold’s Cow, Sergei Loznitsa’s Babi Yar. Context and Eddie Martin’s We Were Once Kids.
In addition Liebhart confirmed a slew of titles for the Millennium Docs Against Gravity (MDAG) festival including Diem Ha Le’s Children of the Mist in International Competition, and Maia Kenworthy and Elena Sanchez Bellot’s Rebellion in Frontline, both of which world-premiere at IDFA. He has also confirmed Helena Třeštíková’s René – The Prisoner of Freedom in Masters and from, Best of Fests, Frida Barkfors and Lasse Barkfors’ Raising of a School Shooter, Clara Parker Hill and Isabel A Bethencourt’s Cusp, Rami Farah’s Our Memory Belongs to Us and Tuija Halttunen’s How to Kill a Cloud.
On 22 November Liebhart and his colleagues at MDAG will host drinks at Docs for Sale.
“Millennium Docs Against Gravity caters for various tastes and interests. From very specific to broad and common. Our selection process must be ambitious [and] ignite wide interest among public and nationwide media,” he underlined to BDE.
He also echoed IDFA Creative Director Orwa Nyrabia’s assertion that putting on a cinema-based festival in these straitened times is an ‘act of resistance’.
“The flow of intelligent, engaged films and the exchange of ideas and point of view. We all need it. Future films need it too,” said Liebhart.
“What we [as documentary festivals collectively] are showing on the big screen is something extremely wonderful and extremely important and extremely eminent and must be watched in cinemas,” he told BDE in October.
Liebhart confirmed that his festival will run May 13-22 in cinemas within 8 cities (Warsaw, Wroclaw, Gdynia, Poznan, Katowice, Bydgoszcz, Lublin and now Łódź) before going online May 25-June 5 2022. The deadline for film submissions is February 4 2022.
He also told Business Doc Europe that 134,000 tickets were sold for the last edition of his festival, making it the largest film festival in Poland for the second year in a row. 140 films were programmed in cinemas and 128 films online.
The addition of Łódź as a festival city in 2022 automatically guarantees that the ties between the festival and the city’s revered film school will be even stronger, Liebhart underlined, with the school hosting producers and filmmakers for a two-day Industry session of screenings, talks and master-classes that will be open to students, professors and public alike. “This move is heavily based on the legendary school’s traditions of bringing industry experts from all over the world,” Liebhart commented.
In 2022, the fest will host workshops for young filmmakers from Belarus, Ukraine and Georgia to be tutored by multi-award winning Polish filmmakers Jacek Bławut and Mirosław Dembiński.
“We are also the co-partners of a Polish project named Jump in the Doc, aimed at developing documentary cinema for children. During the festival we will host a Children’s Documentary Forum which will include industry meetings, workshops and a pitching session, during which the best project will be granted a special award,” he said.
Additionally, in December 2021, the festival’s VOD service offer to educational establishments will be expanded to stream 70+ “very meticulously curated” docs to schools and colleges, with additional educational materials covering a full range of disciplines from “psychology to politics, from the arts to citizen knowledge.”
