The 19th edition of Millennium Docs Against Gravity kicks off May 13 running to May 22, before heading online May 24 to June 5. The festival has numerous epicentres, Warsaw, Wroclaw, Gdynia, Poznan, Katowice, Bydgoszcz, Lublin and now – as of 2022 – the film city of Łódź.
A total of 170 films will screen at the festival this year. This compares to the 140 films that were programmed in cinemas in 2021, and 128 films online. 134,000 tickets were sold during the last edition of the festival.
Twelve films will compete in main competition for Millennium Bank Award (valued at
€8,000) in 2022. These include many of international major head turners of the past year, including Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, Andrea Arnold’s Cow, Neasa Ní Chianáin and Declan McGrath’s Young Plato and Alex Pritz’s The Territory, which opens the festival. The jury deliberating over the main award comprises top US doccer David France (Welcome to Chechnya), Tamara Kotewska, co-director of Honeyland; and Milenia Fiedler, film editor and head of the Film School in Łódź.
The films in main competition were directed by seven female and six male filmmakers, festival director Artur Liebhart underlined to BDE, and added that there is “near parity” across the festival overall.
The eight local titles competing for the Best Polish Film Award (that includes a cash award of €3,000) include Hanna Polak’s Angels of Sinjar, which recently won the Prix Gilda Vieira de Mello at FIFDH 2022 and Łukasz Kowalski’s The Pawnshop, which is Millennium Docs Against Gravity’s nomination for the Doc Alliance Award, to be announced during the upcoming Cannes FF.
New competitions in 2022 comprise the 15-film Short Film Comp which bestows a €2000 prize for best film (sponsored by TikTok), and the Competition for Best Doc for Young Audiences (with a top prize valued at €1000 ,offered by the Andrzej Wajda Centre for Film Culture in Warsaw).
“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,” festival director Artur Liebhart told BDE in November 2021. “The flow of intelligent, engaged films and the exchange of ideas and POV. We all need it. Future films need it too.”
The festival presents five Ukrainian-themed films this year, including Simon Lereng Wilmont’s Sundance winner A House Made of Splinters, and has programmed charity
screenings in 5 festival cities of Mariupolis (2016) by the late Mantas Kvedaravičius, the Lithuanian director who was killed in the Ukrainian city of Mariupolis on April 2 by Russian invaders. Monies will be donated to Mantas’ family. There is prize of €4000 for the Best Ukrainian film across the festival programme.
The addition of Łódź as a festival city in 2022 automatically guarantees that the ties between the festival and the city’s film school will be even stronger, festival director Liebhart underlined to BDE, 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.
The city will welcome heavyweight directors Sergei Loznitsa and Bill Morrison during the May 15 ‘Encounter of Two Masters’ event. “Two directors who have mastered the use of archival footage will share the secrets of their work, their approach to history presented in their films through images from the past, and their significance for our understanding of the present,” reads the festival programme.
The event follows screenings of Morrison’s The Village Detective: A Song Cycle, Sunken Films and Back to the Soil, which are part of a 17-film retrospective of his work. Loznitsa’s Babi Yar. Context competes for this year’s Millennium Bank Award.
Industry events include the May 15 Eastern Europe Against Gravity pitch event during which 10 new projects by emerging filmmakers from Belarusia, Ukraine and Georgia will be presented for the first time to leading sales agent, festival programmers and potential partners producers. There is prize of €6000 for the best pitch on the subject of Ukraine.
The 3rd Young Audience’s Documentary Forum (May 17) will include a pitch session for new docs aimed at young audiences, as well as overarching debate which will examine the local landscape for the local finance and production of kids’ non-fiction content.
The May 12 Doc Development programme, organized by the Władysław Ślesicki Film Foundation, focuses on the intensive development of documentary projects at an early stage, under the supervision of leading Polish filmmakers, including Jacek Bławut and Lidia Duda. The aim of the program is to prepare projects for submitting applications to TV stations or for funding from the Polish Film Institute.
