Ji.hlava 22

Judith Auffray’s ‘07:15 – Blackbird’ wins top Opus Bonum prize. Best debut to Fanie Pelletier’s ‘Bloom’. ‘Kapr Code’ wins main award in Czech Joy. Best Film in Testimonies is ‘Into the Weeds: Dewayne "Lee" Johnson vs Monsanto company’ by Jennifer Baichwal. Otilia Babara’s ‘Love is Not an Orange’ wins Silver Eye Feature Award, given by the Institute of Documentary Film.

Czech Hana Blaha Šilarová talked to Business Doc Europe ahead of her presentation at Emerging Producers, a training programme designed for 17 up-and-coming European doc producers. Spanning Ji.hlava and Berlinale 2023, the programme will also introduce each to the international film market, and enable them to create a new network of film professionals “to increase the potential of European co-productions.”

Eight project awards were handed out October 28, as well as two festival poster awards. The Ji.hlava New Visions Award 2022 for the most promising European project went to ‘Forest,’ while ‘Recording Mary’ won the Ji.hlava New Visions Award 2022 for the most promising U.S. project. The Silver Eye Award 2022 for Short Docs went to Ukrainian Kateryna Ruzhyna’s ‘Avitaminosis.’

It’s 44 years now since American preacher Jim Jones presided over the notorious mass-murder/suicide in which over 900 people died, most by taking poison, in a settlement in Guyana. Now, Czech director Jan Bušta has used the 1978 Jonestown massacre as the starting point for his radical new documentary, world premiering in Jihlava. The director explains talks to BDE.

In Cisco Kid, world premiering in Ji-hlava Opus Bonum Competition, a solitary young queer person is single-handedly rebuilding a ghost town in Utah. The film looks great. In fact, the whole thing looks more or less how you’d imagine a ghost town would look in frontier times. And to see one person, hammer in hand, trying to revive it is mind-boggling.

Czech filmmaker Victor Portel tells Business Doc Europe about his new doc, screening in International and Czech Joy competitions, concerning Vladimir Dzuro, an ex-Prague detective turned International Criminal Tribunal investigator, whose painstaking research led to the arrest of a notorious war criminal from the former Yugoslavia.

A selection of new Czech docs were presented at Ji.hlava IDFF October 26 to a professional audience of festival programmers, sales agents and other interested parties. After the presentation, moderator Diana Tabakov, head of acquisitions at Doc Alliance Films, offered a personal overview of the presentation, and the Czech doc scene in general, to Business Doc Europe.

What is it like to be young and female and/or queer in this day and age, when social media is part of your daily practice, defines who you are, undermines or boosts your self-confidence? Answers can be found in this atmospheric, sensitive and revealing documentary set in the world of girls on the verge of adulthood.

US performance artist, writer and filmmaker Andrea Kleine talks to Business Doc Europe about her film in which she performs to an empty theatre, the same one she and her partner Bobby Previte holed up in during quarantine. “That was the crux of the film. How do you recreate that feeling of ‘live’ when nobody is there?” she muses.

In his film selected for International Competition, Mateo Ybarra returns to familiar ground as he examines Swiss army conscripts recording their drills and exercises, as well as their reflections on mandatory military service. “Far from being convinced by the relevance of such an institution and its functioning, the intertwining of civil and military society is…fascinating to me,” Ybarra tells BDE.