18/10/2016 - Jihlava will bring together a number of documentaries from all over the globe discussing current affairs

The biggest documentary film event in Central and Eastern Europe, the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, has revealed the programme for its upcoming 20^th edition. The Opus Bonum competition, which maps current trends in world documentary cinema, will include titles such as Belgian documentary 27 Times Time by Annick Ghijzelings, which promises to cross borders and centuries in order “to explore time and its representations”, Maria Kourkouta and Niki Giannari’s look into the daily life of refugees in the Idomeni refugee camp, Spectres Are Haunting Europe [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Maria Kourkouta and Niki Gi…
film profile], the Portuguese essay on “mirrors, representations, the theatre and life”, The Room You Take by Pedro Filipe Marques, and Maurits Wouters’ documentary, The Road Back, composed of found-footage from “the descendants of a lost micro-civilisation”, among others.

A collection of Central and Eastern European documentaries feature in the Between the Seas competition, with this year’s edition set to include A Hole in the Head [+see also:
trailer
interview: Robert Kirchhoff
film profile] by Slovakian documentarian Robert Kirchhoff, a social and historic probe into the Roma holocaust, Rafal Skalski’s exploration of the hedonistic versus the ascetic, following young man who trades in his extravagant lifestyle to temporarily join a Buddhist monastery, Monk of the Sea [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Georgian documentary The Things by Nino Gogua, which looks at the possessions Georgian refugees took with them as they fled their homes during the Russo-Georgian War in August, 2008, and Ognjen Glavonić’s Depth Two [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], a thriller documentary about a mass grave in the suburbs of Belgrade.

The Czech Joy line-up brings together a number of noteworthy domestic offerings, as part of which three episodes from the television documentary series Czech Journal will be screened along with the celebrated documentary by Miroslav Janek, Normal Autistic Film [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], as well as Tomáš Bojar and Rozálie Kohoutová probe into racism, FC Roma [+see also:
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film profile]. Experimental oeuvres have a special place at the festival in the form of the Fascinations section, which “expands the possibilities of filmic expression” from all over the world. The sidebar, Fascinations: Exprmntl.cz, focuses solely on Czech offerings such as De Potentia Dei, an essay by Ondřej Vavrečka shot on 16mm featuring the main motifs of a human leg, a circle and a square.

As well as the competitive sections, the festival will offer retrospectives examining the works of Bill Morrison and Éric Rohmer, and will also cast the spotlight on documentaries made in Iceland Turkey as part of a wide range of non-competitive sections. Many perspectives on the current world will be shed in the Witness section, the boundaries between fiction and documentary will be blurred in Doc-Fi, and domestic student works will be put on display in the FAMU Presents sidebar.

The full line-up of the 20^th Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (25-30 October) can be found here.