For its 20th anniversary, the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, the largest gathering of its kind in Central Europe, has prepared a wide and rich industry programme, and opened a new venue dedicated to the section – The Lighthouse, on the city's main Masaryk Square.

The Open Programme, free for industry guests, press and audiences alike, covers the whole process of documentary filmmaking through master classes by standout professionals in their respective fields: American experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison, Icelandic composer Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, American activist filmmaker Mike Bonanno, British producer Rebecca O'Brien, editors Jacopo Quadri (Italy) and Claire Atherton (France), Icelandic director Friðrik Thór Friðriksson, and Slovak filmmaker Martin Kollar.

To complete the chain, Jihlava has organised panel discussions on international promotion with representatives of the national film bodies of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Denmark and Iceland; on distribution with sales agents and distributors from the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic; and on festival programming with curators and festival managers from the US, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, France and the Netherlands.

The second edition of Conference: Fascinations deals with the placement and distribution of experimental films at festivals, galleries, and available and unexplored channels. On the other hand, the Ex Oriente programme includes lectures on budgeting by Ralph Wieser of Austria's Mischief Films; European financing sources for documentary production by the EDN's Mikael Opstrup, Rough Cut Service's Ikka Vehkalahti, and Peter Jaeger of Jaeger Creative (who will also hold a lecture for filmmakers about marketing their films to festivals, markets and sales agents); and the legal issues of international co-production by German attorney Dr Stefan Rull. Ex Oriente's Masterclasses feature Georgian filmmaker Salome Jashi (The Dazzling Light of Sunset [+lire aussi :
critique
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fiche film]) and German producer Gregor Streiber of Inselfilm.

The present state of the documentary field and filmmaking in general will be debated through a case study by Slovak filmmaking trio Peter Kerekeš, Marek Šulik and Martin Kollar, intriguingly entitled "Things Are Different than Expected", while the festival's 20th anniversary inspired a discussion named "2036: A Documentary Odyssey", at which film-fund representatives, filmmakers, educators and curators will talk about what the genre might look like in 20 years' time. The state of the region will be discussed in Central European Identity, featuring journalists and film critics.

The Festival Identity workshop will once again take place at Jihlava, and at the Festival HUB event, representatives of nine festivals from around the world will present their gatherings to the public.

Finally, the festival will introduce the 2017 generation of Emerging Producers (16 representing Europe and two representing this year’s guest country, Mexico), and the Silver Eye Awards, presented by the Institute of Documentary Film to the best documentary films from the East Silver Market.