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During the making of his Jihlava Film Festival winning film, “Distances” director Matej Bobrik walked right into the middle of an argument.

“Actually, I was standing a bit to the side. It was my cinematographer Filip [Drożdż] who was at the center of it all,” he jokes, recalling heated discussions of his protagonists: a Nepali family who moved to Warsaw in search of a better life.

“It was an intense experience and there were moments when we wondered why they never said ‘stop!’ to us. I think we managed to get so close, because we never forced them to do anything. They knew we were always rooting for them.”

Named as the Best Film from the Central and Eastern Europe of Czech fest’s Opus Bonum section, “Distances” was produced by Agnieszka Skalska for Koi Studio and backed by the Polish Film Institute.

“A few years ago, we noticed there were...

Croatian documentary Ship from Elvis Lenić won the Opus Bonum award, the festival’s top prize.

Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík’s Photophobia won the best Czech documentary award at the 27th edition of the Czech Republic’s documentary film festival Ji.hlava (October 24-29).

Slovakia’s entry for best international feature at the Oscars, Photophobia centres around a Ukrainian family hiding from the war in a metro station where one of the young sons meets another girl trapped there and they form a bond. Also winner of best European film at Venice’s Giornate degli Autori, the film is...

From hulks of collective ruins to immigrant family struggles, marginalized communities and climate crises, the 27th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival wrapped Saturday with honors for work from diverse perspectives on a myriad of pressing subjects.

The Opus Bonum main prize went to Elvis Lenic’s Croatian doc “Ship,” an exploration of an unintentional monument to socialist worker collectives in the form of the Uljanik shipyard, once the country’s largest. Now an industrial graveyard, the vast port facility is closing down after 160 years, a moment Lenic filmed with powerful imagery in a story that reminds viewers of the fates of those who built the now ghostly cargo vessels and their docks.

The Ji.hlava audience prize went to Czech doc “Is There Any Place for Me, Please?” Jarmila Stukova’s powerful portrait of a woman who survived an acid attack by an ex-boyfriend, which connected with viewers in...

Projects will be presented during festival’s Industry Days section.

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) has unveiled the projects that will be showcased during its Eastern Promises industry strand, which takes place on July 3-4.

27 film projects have been selected for Eastern Promises’ Works in Progress, Works in Development – Feature Launch and First Cut+ Works in Progress strands.

The most promising projects, selected by international juries, will receive awards worth a total of €115,000. The showcase of projects to industry professionals will take place during this year’s Kviff Industry Days.

Eleven fiction and documentary features have been selected for the Works in Progress strand.

Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival’s Eastern Promises industry platform has unveiled 27 film projects that will be showcased during its Works in Progress, Works in Development – Feature Launch and First Cut+ Works in Progress presentations. The most promising projects, selected by international juries, will receive awards with a total value of 115,000 Eur.

The showcasing of projects to industry professionals will take place in Karlovy Vary, during this year’s Kviff Industry Days on July 3 (Works in Progress and Works in Development – Feature Launch) and July 4 (First Cut+ Works in Progress).

For Works in Progress, 11 fiction and documentary feature films in the late stage of production or post-production from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa have been selected.

The following projects will compete for prizes of a total value of 100,000 Eur:

“Distances” (Poland)

Director: Matej Bobrik

Producer: Agnieszka Skalska...

Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians has taken the top Crystal Globe award at the 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The Czech fest’s Special Jury Prize went to Ana Katz’s Sueño Florianópolis, and Olmo Omerzu was named best director for the film Winter Flies.

See the complete list of winners below.

As previously announced, the festival, which ran from June 29 – July 7, presented a Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema to actor and director Tim Robbins, and to Rain Man director Barry Levinson.

In all, the non-specialized festival, with three competitive categories, screened 236 films, with a total of 140,135 tickets sold, according to the festival. Among the films were 143 full-length and 38 short features; 55 documentary films (including 35 full-length). World premieres totaled 35 films, with eight international premieres and seven European premieres.

The fest was organized by Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary,...

Polish showcase to highlight 26 movies.

Polish Days (August 8 - 10), the showcase of national films at the T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival (August 3 - 13) in Wroclaw, Poland, has announced twenty-six titles this year.

Among six completed films are Andrzej Jakimowski’s Once Upon a Time in November and Maciej Sobieszczański’s The Reconciliation.

Eleven films will be presented at the pitchings event while nine films will be presented in the work-in-progress section.

Around 150 guests from Poland and abroad are expected to attend the event in Wrocław, which has been organized since 2013 in co-operation with the Polish Film Institute.

Projects presented in past years include Spoor, The Last Family, The Birds Are Singing in Kigali and All These Sleepless Nights.

New Horizons is being held two weeks later in the calendar this year to accomodate incoming sporting event The World Games, meaning the Polish festival coincides with the Locarno Film Festival for the first time.

Full list of...

Norway’s submission to the Oscars to open 56th edition; Jihlava docfest winners revealed.

Bent Hamer’s latest feature film 1001 Grams will be the opening film tonight for Lübeck’s Nordic Film Days (Oct 29 – Nov 2), which has a programme of 172 films screening from the North and North-East of Europe.

Norway’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar was co-produced by Cologne-based Pandora Film Produktion and will be released theatrically in Germany by Pandora’s distribution arm, Pandora Film Verleih, on December 18.

Ahead of 1001 Grams’ German premiere in Lübeck, co-producer Claudia Steffen and her partners at Pandora issued a statement expressing their concern „that one of our most important allies, the Film- und Medienstiftung Nrw, has faced significant cut-backs from its two main shareholders.“

Earlier this month, public broadcaster Wdr had revealed its intention to reduce its voluntary annual contribution to Germany’s leading regional film fund by $ 3.82m (€ 3m), and the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia...

Projects range from a film about centenarians to documentaries about renowned hunger striker Bobby Sands, Winnie Mandela, Ratko Mladic and Madonna’s backing dancers.Scroll down for full list of projects

Idfa (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) has unveiled the 50 titles that will be presented at its international co-finance and production market, the Idfa Forum (Nov 24-26).

At the market, filmmakers and producers will present their documentary projects to commissioning editors from international television stations and other financiers with the aim of completing finance for their documentary projects.

A total of 50 projects have been selected for the upcoming Idfa Forum, including new projects by Heddy Honigmann, Janus Metz and Vitaly Mansky.

The Idfa 2014 programme contains 17 documentaries that were presented as projects at previous editions of the Idfa Forum.

Projects selected for this year’s Idfa Forum will be pitched in a variety of settings: the central pitches in the main auditorium of the Compagnietheater, the round table...