Documentary Filmmakers (not only) About Themselves

Jarmila Outratová has been leading the Jihlava IDFF Industry Office for the third year now. A department creating programs geared towards film professionals, which is an integral part of the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. Some events targeting film professionals are held year-round, others are concentrated just within the festival week held in the last week of October. For example, every year DOCU Talents organize a presentation of documentary films from Central and Eastern Europe, which is co-organized with the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary. This year, as part of the program for film professionals, a workshop Emerging Producers is being held, there is a discussion platform called the Inspiration Forum, and there also will be a presentation of representatives of different film festivals known as Festival Identity. However, some parts of the listed programs are open to the general public as well as all the festival visitors.

What is the reasoning behind the fact that there are some parts of the program for film professionals that are closed to the public and others to which regular visitors are welcome?
The meaning behind dividing the program into public and closed parts is that the program open to the public will interest the average visitor, who came to Jihlava mainly to watch movies. The professional part is narrowly targeted directly at directors, producers, filmmakers, experimenters and representatives of festivals, so it cannot offer very interesting topics to the visitor who came to the festival mainly to watch movies. For example, ways of financing a Czech documentary film are discussed in the closed part, a topic that is specifically directed towards directors, or we introduce film schools in Norway and Switzerland and compare them with the way FAMU functions.

The program also includes a special presentation on how to write an application to the State Fund for Cinematography and so on. In contrast, public presentations may be of interest to visitors who routinely do not come into contact with the filmmakers. For the viewers, the presentations of producers in the program Emerging Producers can be very appealing, or the Festival Hub where nine to ten guests will introduce various film festivals from around the world in the PechaKucha style. This year's presentation will introduce, among other festivals, the American festival True/False, or the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea. The Festival Hub features a presentation of very interesting festivals not only from Europe.

Could you specify what a presentation given in the PechaKucha Night format looks like and what the visitor to such a presentation can expect?
PechaKucha is a style of presentation that tries to be as short as possible while attempting to be as clear as possible at the same time. Therefore, it has precise rules. The main rule is that it is possible to project 20 photos, each of which appears only for 20 seconds. So the final format is 20x20 and in result no individual presentations can be longer than 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The clearly defined structure forces the speaker to truly stick to the topic. The visitor will find out the fundamentals of each presented festival at a very pleasant fast pace.

Why should the visitor to the festival attend the presentation Festival Hub?
The Festival Hub offers the visitors the opportunity to learn about what kind of other festivals there are around the world, and how they work, what kind of films they feature and what these film festivals focus on. If the visitors are interested in other festivals from around the world, the Festival Hub is an opportunity for finding out more about them. At the same time, it allows the visitors to get to know the festival director, or the head of the program of the introduced festivals.

Are the festivals presented at the Festival Hub subject to some criteria of selection?
We try to select the nine presented festivals in such a way that we ensure that we cover most of the world and also provide a wide range of types of festivals- both small and large, focusing only on documentary films, or contrariwise, those who combine documentaries with feature film, or experimental films.

What other parts of the program for film professionals are open to the general public and what is the most interesting event on offer?
Besides the aforementioned Emerging Producers or Hub Festival, the visitors were most interested in the public presentation of the lecturers of the Inspiration Forum the previous years. This year, we have very interesting guests. We will feature a lecture with Julian Assange, who has been staying at the Ecuador embassy in London for the fourth year in a row. On Wednesday, on the day of the national holiday, in the Thor Heyerdahl cinema- DKO he will be present via video conference. Masha Aljochinová, from the group Pussy Riot, who found herself in jail because of her activities will also come. She will be accompanied by representatives of a Russian non-profit organization dedicated to fighting for freedom of speech. This part where lecturers present their story and their experience is open to all festival-goers. Apart from the public presentation, the lecturers also have a closed private where they help ten chosen directors from around the world develop themes for documentary films.

What does the process of selecting the directors chosen to take part in the closed part of the Inspiration Forum look like?
We choose ten attendees from the applicants according to the type of their work and motivation.

In the past years, there have always been three personalities to attend the Inspiration Forum. Who is the third quest this year?
The third guest this year is a Syrian refugee and soccer coach combined, Osama Abdul Mohsen, who is known by today's society thanks to the video, in which he was tripped by a reporter of Hungarian television during his run across the Hungarian-Serbian border. A month ago, there also was an emotional video of Mohsen and his sons meeting the famous football player Cristiano Ronaldo at the football stadium in Madrid that went viral. Osama Mohsen will arrive with his children to discuss his experience regarding the refugee crisis.

How did you get the idea of combining the founder of WikiLeaks, a controversial musician, and a Syrian refugee?
We are trying to open topics that are somewhat tumultuous, or ones that appear to be very straightforward. However, the aim is not to promote such issues, but rather contribute for there to be space for discussion.

So you have chosen these guests that have been scrutinized by the media on purpose, to open a discussion, even among the specific guests themselves?
The basic principle of the Inspiration Forum is to bring guests to the Jihlava festival that may be of interest to the filmmakers, even though they are involved in issues other than film. In discussion with them, the filmmakers can discover an interesting impulse for their documentary film, the polarized, strong and controversial opinions of the invited guests can be of aid in this.

This year a crowd-funded campaign was created. Is it a matter of only this year? How will the collected money be used?
This year we got together interesting guests, who are also relatively inaccessible, so we need to fund their appearance at the Inspiration Forum. We will, therefore, use the collected money to cover the higher production costs associated with the participation of these guests.

Jarmila Outratová

What kind of similarly controversial guests attended previous years of the Inspiration Forum? According to what criteria do you choose the lecturers for the Inspiration Forum?
The Czech documentary filmmaker Filip Remund is the curator for the Inspiration Forum, and he selects guests from the likes of artists to political activists. Last year the artists were represented by Kateřina Šedá and Petr Pavlenský who combines art with political activism. In the previous years, the lecturers of the Inspiration Forum included Gao Xingjian, a Chinese writer and Nobel Prize winner for literature, poet Moazzam Begg, who rose to fame for being unjustly imprisoned at Guantanamo for a crime he did not commit and of which the precise nature has still remained a secret. They released him after three years in prison, without him being formally charged and he has never received any explanation or apology. Based on this experience Moazzam Begg has founded an organization that helps people who are unjustly imprisoned.

The Inspiration Forum really is attended by a wide range of people who are often associated with current socio-political themes. What is the significance of their presence for filmmakers and ordinary visitors, apart from the fact that the filmmakers can get inspired to create new projects?
Indeed, we try to make it as colourful as possible. The first reason behind this truly is providing creative inspiration. I'm going to paraphrase the main idea behind creating the Inspiration Forum. Every year three thousand films apply to our festival. From this amount we do not choose even three hundred, so every tenth film gets featured in the program. The rest of the rejected films are very similar to each other and usually very limited, either thematically and/or cinematically. On these grounds, we decided to bring new inspirational sources into documentary filmmaking.

We consider the producers themselves to be a project

What is the role of the program Emerging Producers?
Unlike other similar projects that are created at other festivals and other different platforms, Emerging Producers has nothing to do with producing specific films but solely focuses on the personal and professional development of the producers that arrive. The producers do not come with any of their projects, but for themselves. They themselves are the project, on which we work on for five of the festival days at Jihlava.

How do you choose producers for this program? Can every producer who applies attend?
No, not everyone can. There is a lot of work that goes into this program. We are not only its organizers but also the curators. Not only do the producers apply to us themselves, we also do our own recruitment. We look for interesting young producers of documentary film in various countries, some of which cannot even be found represented on the European market. We also try to appeal to other producers. Overall, out of a heap of applications, let’s say 160 entries, a final of eighteen have the chance to make it to the final selection. Seventeen producers are from Europe and one is a representative of a so-called Guest Country. For two consecutive years, Colombia has been that foreign country, the year before that we had a participant from Argentina. We try to cover our entire continent when choosing the seventeen European producers, to represent Scandinavia, the eastern, western and southern parts of Europe and simultaneously to select only one producer per country. Unfortunately, there usually are more than seventeen countries in the running, so each one cannot be represented every year. The final choice then largely depends on the personality strength of the individual producers.

On the basis of what do you choose the producers? What do you judge them on?
Every producer fills out an application, where we ask for basic information. They then send us samples of their films and a cover letter, stating reasons why they want to take part in the project. Consequently, we invite every applicant to an interview via Skype. We really do speak to each producer and only then on the basis of the interviews do we choose the participants. The process has several rounds and takes some months to complete.

What part of the program Emerging Producers can a regular visitor attend?
The program Emerging Producers has only one public part and that is a presentation of the producers. The rest is closed to the public. Only the selected producers attend the rest and is held in the form of an educational program.

What do the presentations of the selected producers offer festival visitors and who might benefit from attending?
Primarily, the presentations are of interest to filmmakers, because here they can find interesting people from different countries. For example, when a Czech producer is looking for a co-producer from Denmark or Iceland, he can find him there this year. The festival visitor can perhaps satisfy his curiosity. Movie excerpts are part of the presentations, but only very short ones. Because there are eighteen producers, the individual presentations are brief. Each producer has only 1 minute to introduce himself, and then two minutes to show his work. The Emerging Producers project is very important, especially, for the producers themselves. They get to know each other and it is a huge source of contacts for the creation of possible European and international co-productions.

Has some kind of a co-production been created thanks to this program?
Co-productions are already in the making, but for now no project has been completed. This is the fourth year that we are preparing this program. The production and development of each co-produced film can take three to four years to complete. It's a long process, but we hope to see "our children” soon. It is also important to emphasise, that it is not just about creating a platform for co-productions, but also to create a place where producers meet one another, and it is a place to prepare more demanding film titles (just like the Jihlava IDFF is the place where such films are regularly featured).

Which part of the program for film professionals open to the public, shouldn’t the visitors miss?
Apart from what we have already mentioned, I would like to invite the visitors to attend masterclasses. This year they will be given by the Russian versatile director Viktor Kossakovsky, Croatian filmmaker Lordan Zafranović, or the legend of Armenian cinematography Artavazd Peleshyan. It is a wonderful opportunity to meet great personalities of documentary film and hear them talk about their methods and views on documentary cinema.