31/10/2023 - From 4 November, Florence will play host to 124 documentary films and special guests along the lines of Liv Ullmann, Pedro Costa, Ulrich Seidl and Anton Corbijn

From 4 to 12 november, Florence will host the 64th Festival dei Popoli, offering up 124 documentary films and welcoming guests along the lines of Oscar-winner Liv Ullmann, on the occasion of Dheeraj Akolkar’s biopic dedicated to the actress, Liv Ullmann - A Road Less Travelled [+see also:
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interview: Liv Ullmann
film profile], photographer and director Anton Corbijn, who’ll be presenting Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) [+see also:
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film profile], and singer Pete Doherty, who’ll be seeking out artistic redemption in Katia deVidas’ Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin [+see also:
film review
film profile]. Three masterclasses are on the agenda, led by Portugal’s Pedro Costa, Austria’s Ulrich Seidl - who’ll be presenting Wicked Games - Rimini Sparta, a retelling of the stories in his latest works Rimini [+see also:
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interview: Ulrich Seidl
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Directed by Alessandro Stellino, the festival will be opened by the American production Joan Baez I Am a Noise, which paints an intimate portrait of the legendary American singer and activist at the hands of Karen O’Connor, Miri Navasky and Maeve O’Boyle. The festival’s International Competition will present 18 titles, whether feature films, medium-length films and short films, assessed by a jury composed of director Nataša Urban (Serbia), producer Alice Lemaire (Belgium) and curator and distributor Johannes Klein (Germany). Stealing focus among the feature films offered up are Hypermoon [+see also:
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interview: Mia Engberg
film profile], which closes Swedish director Mia Engberg’s Belleville trilogy; The Lost Boys of Mercury [+see also:
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film profile] by France’s Clémence Davigo, in which a group of elderly people speak of the abuse they suffered in the Fifties and Sixties in the Mercury Correctional Facility for Children; Zinzindurrunkarratz by Spain’s Oskar Alegria, who presented his second film Zumiriki [+see also:
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interview: Oskar Alegría
film profile] at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 and is now returning with a reflection on film; Je ne sais pas où vous serez demain, which sees French filmmaker Emmanuel Roy entering Marseille’s administrative detention centre (CRA), where a doctor provides advice to migrants awaiting repatriation; Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano [+see also:
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interview: Cyril Aris
film profile] by Cyril Aris, which takes us behind the scenes on the set of Mounia Akl’s first feature film, Costa Brava, Lebanon [+see also:
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film profile], whose filming was jeopardised by an explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020; The Buriti Flower [+see also:
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interview: João Salaviza and Renée Nad…
film profile] (Portugal/Brazil) by Joao Salaviza and Renee Nader Messora, which won the Best Cast accolade in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2023; Calls from Moscow [+see also:
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film profile] (Cuba/Germany/Norway) by Cuba’s Luis Alejandro Yero; The Mother of All Lies by Morocco’s Asmae El Moudir, which jointly won this year’s Golden Eye for Best Documentary in Cannes; and the medium-length movie Taxibol by Italy’s Tommaso Santambrogio, revolving around an encounter between Filippino filmmaker Lav Diaz and a Cuban taxi driver.

Seven documentaries are set to grace the Italian Competition, ranging from Dalla parte sbagliata by Luca Miniero to Vista mare [+see also:
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film profile] by François-Xavier Destors and Alfonso Pinto.

Likewise worth a mention, in the Doc Highlights line-up, is the inter-generational dialogue between women presented in Grandmother’s Footsteps by Lola Peploe (showcasing Bernardo Bertolucci’s last screen appearance) and Oscar-winner Luc Jacquet’s journey to the South Pole in Antarctica Calling [+see also:
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(Translated from Italian)