Docu Talents from the East

It was the 20th edition of this precious initiative developed at the Jihlava FF and co-hosted here in Sarajevo by the festival. Head of the festival in Czech Republic Marek Hovorka and Sarajevo Industry boss Masha Markovic led the presentation of 8 projects. But first some background taken from the IDF page:

“Docu Talents from the East is a presentation of newest documentary crop from the region Central and Eastern Europe.

Each year since 2005, ten documentary projects in the stage of production and post-production are selected by representatives of the Ji.hlava IDFF.

Docu Talents is held as part of CineLink Industry Days at the Sarajevo Film Festival. Directors and producers of the selected feature-length documentaries introduce their projects during eight-minute presentations and the most promising project receives the Docu Talent Award accompanied by a financial prize in the amount of 5,000 USD.

Since 2005, Docu Talents has been a launch pad for a number of documentaries, including Rabbit a la Berlin, Blind Loves, Matchmaking Mayor, The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories, Cooking History, René, Fortress, Pipeline, Daniels´s World, Under the Sun, FC Roma, Close Relations, The Road Movie and Honeyland.”

Happy to read this list of former participants, most of them are projects I know from my time at the Ex Oriente training programme.

Of the 8 films-to-be I was mostly impressed by two, “The Big Chief” by Polish Tomasz Wolski and “Give Love Create” by Hungarian Márton Vizkelety.

Wolski is a master in archive based documentary, no surprise that he has been working with Sergei Loznitsa – a quote from filmkommentaren:
“Wolski is one of the excellent documentary film directors from Poland, together with Pawel Lozinski and Wojciech Staron and many many others. I say so from having seen ”Ordinary Country” (http://www.filmkommentaren.dk/blog/blogpost/4759/and now ”1970”. His “The Big Chief” is also an archive based story on the fascinating troubled life of Leopold Trepper (Photo Wikipedia), legendary “spy mastermind”, Jewish, and to say the least not popular in anti-semitic Poland after the war, as it is written in the paper from the presentation yesterday afternoon, “the USSR, his former ally, saw him as a burden”.

The Hungarian “Give Love Create”, produced by Eclipse Film, headed by Julianna Ugrin, who with director Márton Vizkelety, stood behind “Holy Dilemma” and behind the brilliant “A Woman Captured”, is a portrait of scientist Gyula Dékány, a charismatic personality who “is working on synthesizing compounds to cure Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Is life just a chemical information system”? The teaser was the best I saw yesterday, Cinema!

Good luck to all the makers and congratulations again to the organisers having found a fine format of presentation for a huge crowd at the Industry Cinelink new venue at SwissHotels.

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Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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