Ji.hlava at 30: Documentaries that changed the world

Over the past three decades, documentary film has become one of the principal ways of understanding an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Festival director Marek Hovorka says that, in a globalized world where people have instant access to information but consume increasingly short-form content, documentaries play an irreplaceable role in providing reflection on world events.

“I’m super happy that after 30 years of the festival, I see that documentary filmmakers are now really those who bring fresh reflection of current issues of today’s world. In the past, we were used to getting this feedback from media, but after the arrival of the internet, after media got mostly online, they are pushed to be as fast as possible.”

Choosing a central theme for this year’s edition was a challenge given the diversity of the 350 films involved. Marek Hovorka says that the organisers decided to focus on films that changed the world.

“There are so many films that changed lives in a good way. For example, very well-known film is The Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris or Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman, but also films by Rithy Panh or Chris Marker. So we have 13 titles, which really had a strong impact on people’s lives.”

Other films in the retrospective include Harvest of Shame, which helped draw attention to the plight of migrant farm workers in the United States, and Children Without Love, a Czechoslovak documentary that contributed to public debate about the care of children in institutional settings.

The festival will also look back on its own history through an archival film essay by director Andrea Slováková, provisionally titled Ji.hlava 30: Thinking Through Film. Drawing on almost 100 hours of archive footage, including recordings of masterclasses and interviews, the film explores how filmmakers’ thinking about documentary cinema has evolved over the past three decades. Hovorka says this was a monumental task.

“She really went through all films, different medias, from the end of 90s or the beginning of the millennium, to fresh materials from  last year,  found what the filmmakers who attended the festival are, how they think about cinema, how they think about filmmaking, how they think about film itself, and it's a super inspiring piece of art,” he says.

This year’s guests of honour will include Vietnamese-American filmmaker, writer and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, who will receive the Contribution to World Cinema Award at the end of the festival. New York-based filmmaker Lynn Sachs will serve on the jury, while Viktor Kossakovsky, a Russian filmmaker who has lived in exile for decades, will return to Ji.hlava. He was the first recipient of the festival’s Contribution to World Cinema Award in 1999.

Kossakovsky will present his latest films at the festival.

“He's coming back to the festival with his two fresh new titles, Hollywood Dust, which he premiered in Venice last month, and Trillion. Both films are super beautiful and have a strong environmental impact,” Hovorka says.

As Ji.hlava celebrates its 30th edition, the festival is also looking to the future. Hovorka says one of its priorities is to maintain a space where filmmakers and audiences can encounter different perspectives freely.

“It's important for us to create an environment which is free, which is full of freedom and bravery, and an environment which is open to all types of perspectives. Because sometimes I have a feeling that we live in a world with different bubbles, and these bubbles somehow have their truths. But we are trying for years to create this environment which is really open-minded and open in terms of thinking freely.”

To learn more about the program of this year’s Jihlava documentary festival, go to their website: https://www.ji-hlava.com