A full lineup of films in the movie theatre section has been published today on the festival website mdag.pl with nearly 150 of the best documentaries from around the world. All the trailers have been made available on the festival's YouTube channel!
The festival will take place between September 4th and 18th in seven cities - Warsaw, Wrocław, Gdynia, Katowice, Poznań, Lublin and Bydgoszcz. Some of the movies will be screened during the online section from September 19th to October 4th.
Dream programme
This year, the lineup is full of titles that inspire passion and make you reflect on the world we live in, to fit with the festival's motto: "With affection for the world". This year, the lineup will be broken into four new sections: Money and Power, Understanding China, Laws of Metaphysics, and From Home Movies. They've been chosen in response to documentary trends that emerged this year. The lineup will also include viewers’ all-time favorite sections: We Can Be Heroes, Intimate Stories, Places, and Masters of Cinema. Together with Amnesty International Poland, we will award the long-running prize for the best movie about human rights during the Man in Film section. Another section worth keeping an eye on is Climate for Change, showing ecological movies. The best one will receive the Green Warsaw Award, sponsored by the City of Warsaw.
It's impossible to put the complexity and breadth of this year's lineup into just a few words. To better understand the variety of issues raised by documentaries, let’s use a few contrasting examples. The audience will join filmmakers on a trip to the most remote places in the world - Kinshasa in Kongo („System K”), the unconquerable peak of the Himalayas (The Wall Of Shadows”) or the Chukchi Peninsula („Whale From Lorino”). They will meet unique people - the renowned Polish director Krystian Lupa („Let’s Try To Jump Into The Well”), a girl who has never been to the theatre („A Year Full Of Drama”), an art thief („The Painter And The Thief”), as well as a family from Donbass, recreating their traumatic experiences with war while filming a movie („The Earth Is Blue As An Orange”). Viewers will get to find out what shapes our world - the inner workings of the World Economic Forum in Davos (“The Forum”), the process of gentrification („The Street”) or community-destroying corruption („Collective”). They will see what impact human behaviour has on the environment - catastrophic and harmful („Rebuilding Paradise”), but also open to the possibility of interspecies collaboration („My Octopus Teacher”). And finally, the audience will have a chance to learn about the beliefs of distant cultures – whether fanatical Polish Catholics („Once Upon A Time In Poland”), Chinese people looking for their spiritual roots („Confucian Dream”), Buddhists isolated from the rest of the world („Sing Me A Song”) or Brazilians amid a conservative revolution („Faith And Fury”). And that’s just a handful of all the movies that will be shown during Millennium Docs Against Gravity!
Incredible guests during this year’s festival
Among all the guests that will visit the festival, we should mention two that will teach a masterclass. The first one is the remarkable documentary director Hubert Sauper, who received the European Film Award and an Oscar nomination for his movie „Darwin’s Nightmare” (2004). The movie „We Come As Friends” (2014) received the Bank Millennium Award - Millennium Docs Against Gravity Grand Prix. Aside from those two titles, this year’s festival will present the master’s newest piece about a journey to Havana, called „Epicentro”. Sauper will deliver a masterclass about his unique process and empathetic approach to the subjects of his movies who suffer due to symbolic, political and economic violence.
The other guest of the festival, Jan Grarup, will deliver a masterclass on cinema’s older sister - photography. This renowned war correspondent is the subject of Boris Bertram’s movie „Photographer of War”, which talks not only about his work, but also a difficult moment in his private life. The meeting with Grarup, as well as his lecture, will be supplemented by a photo gallery entitled „Our everyday genocides” organised in the Iluzjon movie theatre.
