The Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival will mark its 20^th edition this year, an occasion organisers have decided to celebrate with the Jihlava Manifesto. The festival’s programmers have selected one documentary essay representing each year of the festival since 1997 for the special section, which not only reflects two decades of the festival, but documentary cinema as well. The Jihlava Manifesto includes Paper Heads by Slovakian filmmaker Dušan Hanák, Mushroom by Vít Janeček, Austrian director Gustav Deutsch’s title, Film Is (7-12), Austrian-German film In Comparison [+lire aussi :
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Alongside the Jihlava manifesto are two other thematic branches dedicated to the Icelandic landscape (Transparent Landscape: Iceland) and Russian avant-garde cinema. While the first section promises to showcase the cream of Icelandic production, the latter will present seminal works of Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, with Dziga Vertov’s titles featuring prominently. The programme of the 20^th edition of the festival will also include a newly added section for music documentaries. Among the works selected features the Polish film, 15 Corners of the World [+lire aussi :
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fiche film], by Zuzanna Solakiewicz. As well as the main and experimental competition sections, the festival will also examine new forms and formats in the On the Border of Documentary section, which dissects the intersection of documentary and fiction under the Doc-Fi heading, and television cross-genres (docudrama, docu-soap, mockumentary) in the Reality.tv section. A retrospective will be also dedicated to American experimental filmmaker and documentarian Bill Morrison, Translucent Being: Bill Morisson. It will introduce 12 of his pivotal works, 11 of which will make their domestic premiere, and his two latest shorts, The Dockworker’s Dream and Little Orphan Annie, which will have their international premiere.

The Inspiration Forum, aimed at discovering new topics in documentary films that hosted personalities such as Julian Assange, Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot and Nobel Prize laureate in Literature Gao Xingjian in the past, will welcome the architect of the provocative and controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, Philip Zimbardo. Other industry events include the Visegrad Accelarator designed to connect professionals from the Visegrad region in order to discover and support emerging talents, Conference Fascinations, a meeting of experimental documentary film distributors, gallerists and film representatives, the Ex Oriente Film Workshop, which supports the development and funding of creative documentaries from Central and Eastern Europe and the East Silver Market, dedicated to documentary cinema of Central and Eastern Europe

The 20^th Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival will run from 25-30 October 2016.