Ji.hlava IDFF has unveiled the first titles for its 28th edition, extended this year from six to ten days (October 25 – November 3). The festival will open with the world premiere of Ms. President, Marek Šulík’s time-lapse portrait of Slovak President Zuzana Čaputová.
“At a time when a woman may become the next US president, the film takes on yet another dimension, showing that Slovak society is perhaps even more divided than the American one,” comments said Festival Director Marek Hovorka. “Ms. President is a universal testimony to the contemporary world. And it shows us up close what women face when they are in key positions in a system still dominated primarily by men. But despite everything, the film is above all an encouragement, namely to our own integrity and belief in values.”
After its world premiere at Ji.hlava IDFF, the film will be released in Czech cinemas by Aerofilms on 14 November.
Additionally, the festival programme will offer new documentaries from across the world, retrospectives, the best of experimental filmmaking, a number of non-competitive programme sections and traditionally a rich industry programme for film professionals.
Documentary comedy and documentary thriller
“The extension of the festival from six to ten days brings much more comfort in all types of accommodation and will allow us to show all competition and selected non-competition films two to three times. We believe that the first programme news already show that this year’s programme will be truly exceptional,” says festival director Marek Hovorka.
Slovak director Peter Kerekes will present his new film Wishing on a Star at Ji.hlava. The documentary comedy Wishing on a Star, which was presented in Venice in early September, will give the audience a glimpse into the world of astrology and belief in the power of the stars. The heroine is the famous Neapolitan fortune teller Luciana, who believes that a person can change his or her destiny by taking a trip to a destination determined by the stars on his or her birthday.
Czech Joy Competition will present the film War Correspondent by Benjamin Tuček and David Čálek. The documentary provides a look into the life and work of Czech Radio’s war correspondent Martin Dorazín and captures a broader view of the current conflict in Ukraine. “I was surprised by the mixture of the professions of journalist and humanitarian worker in the person of our hero [and] his commitment and help to those in need. My intention and wish was to convey to the film audience situations that I hope they will never experience first-hand,” says filmmaker Benjamin Tuček.
Slovak state and Czech Dream in retrospectives
A “unique insight into the wartime period in Slovakia” will be shown in the retrospective We Have Our Film! Images of the Slovak State. The festival will present nearly twenty-five films from the period of the Slovak state (1939–1947). “The cinematography of the Slovak state is relatively mapped in Slovakia but it is rarely the subject of critical self-reflection. This is related both to our still un-discussed relationship to wartime Slovak statehood and to the lack of distancing of our current statehood from the fascist content of the explored period,” says Petra Hanáková, Slovak film historian and programmer of the section.
The Transparent Beings: Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda retrospective will feature almost two dozen films by the renowned Czech film directors, including the award-winning Czech Dream, about “the hypermarket that never existed”, twenty years after its premiere in 2004. “On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the first screening of Czech Dream, we have prepared a digitally remastered version of our first feature film. This version will have its premiere in Jihlava and after the festival the Czech Dream will be released in cinemas,” says Filip Remunda.
“The authorial approach of Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda has changed our perception of documentary film. With their interventions in reality, their work with absurdity and their desire to reflect the most current social issues in a substantial way, they have drawn the attention of the audience and the media to documentary cinema. Czech Dream is rightly one of the most important Czech documentary films ever made,” says Marek Hovorka, pointing out the other films that the retrospective will offer: Steam on the River (2015), Matrix AB (2015), The White World According to Daliborek (2017) and Meet the Film (2006), which was made on the occasion of the tenth edition of the Ji.hlava IDFF.
Nixon, colonization and mamba
International titles at this year’s Ji.hlava IDFF include Mati Diop’s Dahomey the big winner at this year’s Berlinale. The film focuses on the return of the treasure of the former Dahomey kingdom from France to its place of origin in today’s West African Benin. The treasure, specifically 26 artefacts captured in 1892 on African territory during the colonial period, was returned by France to Benin in 2021.
The French film Documerica, Self-Portrait of Nation on the Brink is an original look back at the sprawling photographic project that was meant to document the (un)success of the American dream in the 1970s. Pierre-Francois Dideka’s first feature film chronicles the work of hundreds of photographers who criss-crossed the United States for five years, photographing cities, towns, countryside, mountains and beaches.
Rhett Cutrell is the director of the American adventure documentary Figures, about a Czech couple and their expedition to find poisonous snakes. Matěj and Zuzana introduce the public to animals that don’t have the best reputation among humans, including mamba, one of the most venomous snake genera, which the couple set out to find in Togo, Africa.
Computing Film retrospective
The Computing Film retrospective maps the field of the archaeology of Artificial Intelligence. It selects works that have worked with the modes of thinking we currently see in the functioning of AI tools, and with the processes of computation or pre-determined and calculated relationships between image and sound components, write organisers. “Translations of sounds into images, colours into rhythm, shapes into sounds have been taking place in the art of the moving image for a hundred years, and it is a fascinating area of creation and exploration,” says Andrea Slováková, the section’s programmer.
Within the programme are pioneering films that were created on computers with punch-labels – such as the animation of Lilian Schwartz, an explorer of computer-based filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s. “We will begin our archaeology of computational thinking in the 1920s, when avant-garde filmmakers were able to evoke rhythm and melody by measuring the length of film strips and arranging visual elements. The exploration of various forms of the involvement of computers and other devices in filmmaking is revelatory, for example in the work of Steina and Woody Vasulka,” Slováková adds.
Virtual Reality will search for survivors of the Holocaust
The Virtual Reality section will present recent works that depict real stories or characters to create immersive documentary experiences. For the tenth time, Ji.hlava will present a number of interactive installations and will also open a VR cinema showing 360° linear films, with the audience watching the same programme at the same time.
“Every year in this section we see where interactive and spatial documentaries are evolving, seeking to draw the audience directly into the action, stories or emotional worlds of current and past events. This year you can enter the everyday life of three Lebanese boys (Dreaming of Lebanon) or explore Banksy’s murals in Ukraine (Murals). In Eternal Walkers by Korean filmmaker Hayoun Kwon, viewers embark on a journey alongside various groups of wandering people – from contemporary refugees to ancient Taoist deities. Christian Zipfel’s work The Lost Time follows a Holocaust survivor and his search for family members. The motif of ‘escape’ is also developed in Shadowtime by the creative duo Deniz Tortum and Sister Sylvester, who innovatively use virtual reality animation techniques to focus on how the climate crisis is affecting population migration.
Inspiration Forum offers the forest and free time
The forest, immunity, war, technology and leisure are the themes of this year’s Inspiration Forum, the Ji.hlava’s discussion platform. Visitors can look forward to fifty guests from across the world. Not to be missed among them will be British environmental philosopher Timothy Morton, British feminist theorist Helen Hester, Micmac activist Cheryl Maloney and Indian peace expert Kirthi Jayakumar. “The Inspiration Forum is a place where we discover together how to live better,” says head of the Inspiration Forum Tereza Swadoschová.
Industry programme extending towards East & Southeast Asia
This year, Ji.hlava Industry Days takes place between October 29 – November 1. The rich industry programme for over 1,000 participating film professionals features:
- introduction of Emerging Producers 2025, the up-and-coming generation of European film professionals,
- meeting of dozens of film festival representatives within Festival Identity
- presentation of new Czech docs entitled Czech Joy in the Spotlight
- Visegrad Accelerator activities focusing on film professionals from the region
- Conference on Ethics in Documentary Film, and more.
The Ji.hlava New Visions Forum & Market will again present upcoming documentary projects from wider Europe and the United States, adding an Asian thread this year. “We have recently been observing an interesting dynamics in the region of East and Southeast Asia and we therefore decided to extend the focus of the Ji.hlava New Visions Forum also on this region. Moreover, we realized that there are not many pitchings in Europe where European and Asian documentary filmmakers could effectively interconnect”, says Ji.hlava head of Industry Jarmila Outratová.
Industry accreditations for film professionals are available for an early bird rate until September 30.
The 28th Ji.hlava IDFF will take place on October 25–November 3, 2024. More information at www.ji-hlava.com and on the festival’s Facebook and Instagram profiles.
