Agora Docs, the professional arm of Thessaloniki Documentary Festival has announced an April 20 deadline for its upcoming Docs in Progress and Pitching Forum programmes, to be held June/July 2021 (fest dates: June 25 to July)
“For the tenth consecutive year, the Docs in Progress segment remains the main event in the Balkans for directors and producers from South-eastern Europe, the Balkan and Mediterranean regions to present their documentary films (currently in post-production) to buyers, co-producers, festival representatives and sales agents at the stage just before completion,” the festival writes. “Docs in Progress has become an important path for selected projects to major festivals, sales agents and distributors around the world, and it offers major awards.”
The selected projects will have the opportunity to prepare their pitch and get advice on their next steps in an online consultation session before the Festival.
April 20 is also the deadline for the Thessaloniki Pitching Forum, an initiative focused on developing documentaries. The Thessaloniki Pitching Forum “explores the limits of documentary” by inviting TV and creative documentaries, documentaries for children and new media projects (VR and/or AR etc).
The participants will have the opportunity to discuss their project and get feedback on their content during the two-day online workshop at the beginning of June and will participate in a pitch preparation onsite in Thessaloniki by experienced international tutors, before their one-day pitching session to international documentary players, and one-on-one meetings with industry professionals suited to their project.
Thessaloniki Pitching Forum and Docs in Progress programmes tune in on the following countries: Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, North Macedonia, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine.
A new initiative in 2021 is the Agora Lab which offers links Greek filmmakers with experienced editors and doc professionals, who help filmmakers sharpen and fine-tune their projects toward final cut, while also navigating them through the terrain of festival strategy. These projects are selected from the Docs in Progress pool of submissions.
Agora Docs also presents Meet the Future, a spotlight on up-and-coming documentary filmmakers, each year from a different country. This year the focus is on Serbia. Serbian directors participating in Meet the Future will introduce themselves to industry professionals and will present material from their upcoming films.
The festival’s new Doc Counselling service will provides one-to-one consultancy sessions on topics such as festival strategy, documentary funding, distribution, Media desk help, TV sales, social media, marketing etc.
Moreover, the Agora Doc Market video library hosts a large number of documentaries produced within the last two years and gives the opportunity to filmmakers to present them to the film professionals (producers, sales agents, distributors, festival representatives, etc) who attend the festival. Agora Doc Market co-operates on this with the online network Cinando.
“Agora Docs is an inseparable and invaluable part of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, which supports the documentary medium from the stage of development to the financing, completion and distribution of the film,” the festival says.
