17TH DOCS AGAINST GRAVITY FESTIVAL
4-18 September (taking into account all 7 city locations, e.g. Warsaw will be 4-13 September) instead of usual May - cinema screenings, afterwards: 19 September-4 October online, without "cinema rooms", it's going to be available all over Poland with no restrictions. Against Gravity's earlier online Docs Against Isolation was a huge success: 113 000 times movies watched in full. After the online festival, all of October will be devoted to online screenings, including previous editions films and workshops for schools. October ones will be available free, after collecting a virtual entry ticket. Over years the festival has grown to become one of the biggest documentary film events in the world. This year the whole program consists of almost half and half male to female movie makers' ratio. In the main competition, there are 15 female and 8 male directors - a result of purely artistic value, the festival programmers are of both sexes. From what I've heard in the (online) conference, my subjective interest is in the following films:
"Blizny" ("Scars") - a Polish documentary about former female warriors of the Tamil Tigers,
films about cinema: on Forman, Tarkovsky, Kubrick, Tarantino, Friedkin, the romantic comedy genre,
a section on various aspects of China, including the problem of smog,
Hubert Sauper's "Darwin's Nightmare" about Tanzania and how the game of global empires affects the poor.
Among potentially interesting events there'll be one devoted to the phenomenon of disbelief in science, replaced by a belief in conspiracy theories and creationism. And another one will delve into how rom-coms affect our partner choice. We can expect also a workshop that will cover dealing with the need of personal peace and the simultaneous need of activism.
There'll be a new section of home-made films - one I'm not going to follow closely. I don't expect content quality from those.
The conference, however convenient for typing notes, wasn't free from technical interruptions. I hope they'll won't hinder watching the online festival part. Also the film screened at the end was too quiet for a laptop and with interruptions:
NOMAD: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BRUCE CHATWIN
Watchable. The bristly fur of a brontosaurus in the beginning turns out to belong to a kind of prehistoric giant sloth. Chaos ensues for the following half the protracted film. The second half is still disorganized but lets you find trivia like a replica of Magellan's ship in Punta Arenas, hear of horrors - to the natives treated like animals - of the era of geographic discoveries, extending until 20th century, learn of free solo climber Stefan Głowacz and of King Nsein who personally acted in a feature movie on West African slave trade. I still don't get what the whole thing was to be about.
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