The 30th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival kicks off October 23, and will feature more than 350 films across its competitive and non-competitive sections, including 106 world premieres, 28 international premieres and eight European premieres.
“If someone had told me in 1997 that thirty years later the festival would be one of Europe’s key documentary film festivals, running for ten days across seven cinemas, accompanied by an Inspiration Forum featuring prominent personalities and with its own international industry programme, I would have found it hard to believe. Not because I thought something like this was impossible, but because I could not have imagined how it would happen. Almost thirty years later, I can see that it has been made possible by the thousands of people who have contributed to Ji.hlava’s story. Like a film, a festival is a collective work, and I am delighted that Ji.hlava has managed to harness this potential to such an extraordinary degree,” says festival director Marek Hovorka.
OPENING FILM: RETURN TO A STRANGE LAND
The anniversary edition will open with Return to a Strange Land by director Olga Malířová Špátová. This poetic documentary follows internationally renowned choreographer Jiří Kylián in a creative process with his lifelong muse and dancer Sabine Kupferberg. The film’s unifying thread is a choreography by Kylián that emerges spontaneously before the camera. Although he has created numerous choreographies for Sabine over the decades, now, at the age of 79, he appears alongside her as a protagonist for the first time. Together, they look back on more than fifty years of artistic collaboration and reflect on the meaning of life, the passage of time, ageing and disappearance.
The film was shot on Terschelling, an island in the northern Netherlands that holds symbolic significance for Sabine and Jiří. It is associated with the 1970s, when they both emigrated to the Netherlands. The film’s central expressive elements are its powerful visual cinematography and music by Leoš Janáček, Claude Debussy, Ludwig van Beethoven, Tōru Takemitsu and Arne Nordheim, composers whose works Kylián has choreographed throughout his career. Archival footage woven throughout the documentary traces their collaboration from 1975 to the present.
“I am fascinated by Jiří Kylián’s choreography, through which he explores relationships and human life. His boundless and exceptional sense of humour, so characteristic of his work, never ceases to surprise me. Equally remarkable is his kindness—or perhaps kindness comes naturally to someone of such stature? Through their art, Sabine and Jiří give audiences wings. They strive to bring optimism into life and ease the burden of the human condition,” says Olga Malířová Špátová about the film.
30TH FESTIVAL TRAILER BY NAOMI KAWASE
The trailer for the 30th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival was created by Japanese director Naomi Kawase, one of Asia’s most prominent filmmakers. For the Ji.hlava trailer, Kawase selected a Corsican lullaby from her personal collection of songs and paired it with images. Through the song, which speaks, among other things, of waiting for someone who will never return, she expresses her opposition to war and her wish for peace. The video stems from her belief that children who grow up listening to lullabies should never become soldiers tasked with killing other people. Three years ago, Ji.hlava presented a showcase of Naomi Kawase’s films, and she also gave a masterclass at the festival. In 2005, she received Ji.hlava’s Award for Contribution to Cinema.
Ji.hlava traditionally entrusts the creation of its official trailers, screened before each film, to exceptional authors of world cinema – Jean-Luc Godard, Kirsten Johnson, Godfrey Reggio and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, for example, have all contributed to this tradition.
AWARD FOR CONTRIBUTION TO WORLD CINEMA: HELENA TŘEŠTÍKOVÁ AND TRINH T. MINH-HA
This year, Ji.hlava IDFF will present its Award for Contribution to World Cinema to two remarkable filmmakers: Czech documentary director and FAMU lecturer Helena Třeštíková and Vietnamese-American filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha.
The award will also be reflected in the festival programme. Ji.hlava audiences can look forward to the television series Bára – Diary of a Rockstar, a three-part version of the documentary of the same name, filmed over many years and following the Czech singer across fifty years of her life and of Czech pop music. The FAMU 80 section, subtitled FAMU and Helena Böhmová, will present four student films by Helena Böhmová, later known as Helena Třeštíková.
Ji.hlava will also present a retrospective of award-winning filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, one of the leading figures of essayistic documentary cinema. The Vietnamese-American filmmaker, writer, composer and theorist challenges traditional ways of representing other cultures, women, minorities and documentary reality itself. The programme includes her debut Reassemblage (1982), a landmark of postcolonial and feminist cinema. Shot in Senegal, the film deliberately rejects the conventions of anthropological documentary, in which Western filmmakers assume the role of authorities explaining another culture to an audience. Another key film in the retrospective is Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), in which Trinh T. Minh-ha uses testimonies from Vietnamese women to explore who tells their stories and what happens to them when they are transformed into cinematic images. Here, too, she deliberately disrupts the notion of documentary as an objective record of reality.
SURPRISE / FILM EVENT OF THE YEAR AND NAZA
To celebrate its 30th birthday, Ji.hlava is offering audiences a gift: a mystery screening. In cooperation with distributor Aerofilms, the festival has prepared a Surprise/Film Event of the Year. According to early reactions, “this documentary overturns established ideas about documentary filmmaking and is among the most talked-about films of this autumn.” Critical responses to its New York premiere have described it as “a radical and groundbreaking work of documentary cinema that will make the world look very different after you have seen it.”
Another exceptional film in this year’s programme is the chilling documentary NAZA by Israeli directing duo Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The investigative documentary uncovers mechanisms behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. NAZA is an abbreviation used by Israeli intelligence to denote so-called “collateral damage”: the number of people expected to die in a strike. “How can one group of people allow the complete dehumanisation of another?” ask the filmmakers, who spent three years recording testimonies from 24 former and serving members of the Israeli armed forces. In the film, they reveal sophisticated concealed systems behind the enormous death toll.
The 30th Ji.hlava IDFF will take place from October 23 to November 1, 2026.
