I am not in Kyiv but I follow what’s going on in a festival that I have visited some times before the war. With pleasure and I have no doubt that the organisers will take good care of every visitor, when Putin arranges a knock back after the Ukrainian success bombing airports and airplane around Russia.

The festival with its attached Industry section is of high quality. There is a section that includes 5 Ukrainian documentaries, they compete and I am happy that I am not a juror. If you read what I have been writing about the 5, you will understand that the jurors will have a difficult task. The films are – go to my reviews – “Songs of Slow Burning Earth” by Olha Zhurba, “Militantropos” by Yelizabeta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozghovyi, “My Dear Théo” by Alisa Kovalenko, “In Limbo” by Alina Maksimenko and “Timestamp” by Kateryna Gornostai. Go to “Search” on filmkommentaren.dk and write the title and you will get to the reviews.

DocuDays is an international festival and I am equally happy to see Hungarian “Your Life Without me” (Photo) by Anna Rubi, it has received several awards in Hungary and abroad. And Lithuanian Giedrė Beinoriūtė is here with her beautiful “On Sacred and Profane”, “… Once a year, a quiet and secluded village in the north-western part of Lithuania comes alive to celebrate Catholic Easter, doing its best to preserve the vanishing ancient tradition of the Guardians of the Cross. With gentle humor observing the preparations of the local community for the vigil and immersing the audience in Easter night, the filmmakers raise questions about the relationship between the sacred and profane in modern world.

And so much more… Enjoy!

Milit – lat. for soldier. Antropos – gr. for human: “A persona adopted by humans when entering a state of war. The chaos of war not only tears apart the physical world but also fractures the Militantropos’ sense of self”.

In every way this is a Big film. Monumental. Almost two hours of intensity. Informational and emotional. Let me take the start and the ending:

The sky accompanied by the sounds of explosions. War. A building, an apartment block in fire. A man is looking, a woman is looking. You read their faces, you know what they are thinking – another bombing, another atrocity. An evacuation train to Vienna is announced at the station. People cleaning up the ruins. Some hands pick up photos, family photos, children…

There is war in Ukraine. And there are brave and skilled documentarians documenting what is going on.

At the end of the film there is a focus on a young man, who plays the violin, it’s a party, the group around him sings and dances, I think it is also a wedding party for him, later on we meet him and his partner checking if he has packed all needed – to go to the war. An emotional scene, followed by goodbye scenes at the station, men in uniform and their loved ones, kids.

Before that a long – feels long and must be like that – sequence where family and friends say farewell to a soldier, who came back in a coffin. Denys is his name. Heartbreaking to watch – and then cut to a beautiful shot of a yellow cornfield followed by scenes, where bees are buzzing around, honey is dripping, plants are being watered, melons picked up on the fields and taken away on a motorbike by a young couple. Life goes on. Resistance.

And of course there are scenes with soldiers going around with mine detectors close to where a farmer lives. And evacuation scenes – the woman and a soldier collects her things quickly but the filmmaker stays for a moment to show us her now empty home.

As a film “Militantropos” is excellently shot and edited, looking forward to watch it again. Happy to see the many financial contributors to the Tabor Collective production, the film will thus go around, watch it.

Ukarine, France, Austria, 111 mins.

If I could, I would take many images from this beautiful documentary and put them on the wall. Most of them B/W images in academy format with many of them colored in blue, yellowish for instance. All is so well composed and thought. Cinema! Images from inside the family’s house with faces difficult to perceive, often enclosed by smoke from the fireplace. Wonderful.

It is poetry and it is about poetry that comes from children in a school in a Chinese mountain area. Their short poems are presented on the images – English translation discreetly in the bottom corner – mostly related to the nature surrounding them but also – at the end – comes a poem that is a “farewell to childhood”. The film has a text in the beginning saying “a letter to childhood” with Gong Yubin as the protagonist. Childhood as it is and should be as long as it lasts.

Gong is a child – see the photo – curious, wants to discover the world, lives with his grandparents and his father, his mother ran away from the hard conditions of the family that has pigs and cows and are farmers, who work hard to make ends meet in the foggy landscape. Do you miss your mother, the director asks Gong, who has built a den of hay, “will answer you later”, he says smiling, a boy who takes his walks alone in the nature, observing, when he is not in school or helping his one-armed father chopping wood.

The government’s propaganda comes out of the loudspeakers in the village, life goes on as always, the grandmother is a strong woman, who interprets the harsh life conditions as fate, when something fails, her husband calls the butcher to come as the pigs “are on hunger strike” (!), grandmother will stop giving Gong pocket money if he uses them on junk food, Gong is with his father in town and gets a bike, if I get it right, normal life conveyed in an extraordinary way. Yes, I write with pleasure: Masterpiece! Visually Magnificent!

China, France, 2025, 80 minutes.

Tonight the winners of the DocsBarcelona festival 2025 were announced at the ceremony at the CCCB, that hosted industry activities duirng the festival and some screenings as well. Here is a copy paste from the festival’s website:

THE FESTIVAL SURPASSES 11,000 ATTENDEES IN ITS PROVISIONAL TALLY AND 800 ACCREDITED PROFESSIONALS

DocsBarcelona today awarded the prizes of its 28th edition at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). Forty-eight films, eleven of them world premieres, contribute to a provisional total—pending the final two days—of 11,000 spectators across the festival’s six venues (the CCCB, Renoir and Phenomena cinemas, the Filmoteca de Catalunya, Casa Montjuïc, and Espai Texas), consolidating the upward trend recorded in 2024, a record year with a 60% increase in attendance. This year, the festival sold out ten screenings and brought around fifty filmmakers to the Catalan capital.

“On this 28th edition, dedicated to archive and memory, we will finish with an 18% increase in in-person attendance. We have added two new venues, reaffirming documentary film as the centerpiece of a cultural space rooted in the city. With forty-one Q&As and enthusiastic public participation, we have generated debate, emotion, and connection. This edition has been a celebration of documentary film as a place for collective reflection and shared experience,” highlights Maria Colomer, Co-Artistic Director and Head of Programming of the festival.

DocsBarcelona Industry, its professional market, has also grown, supporting fifty-eight projects in development and registering over seven hundred professionals from thirty-six countries.

“It is a privilege to see how DocsBarcelona continues to be both a space where professional relationships are forged that directly impact the productions of coming years and a forum for thought and reflection on nonfiction. The market reaffirms itself as the main driving force of the nonfiction industry in Catalonia and Spain,” recalls Èric Motjer, Co-Artistic Director and Head of Industry of DocsBarcelona.

La memoria de las mariposas, a tribute to the indigenous victims of the Peruvian rubber trade, which filmmaker Tatiana Fuentes connects to her own family, crowns this edition’s awards with the Docs Award for Best Film. The Official Jury, composed of Montse Triola, Ana Pfaff, Fito Castillo, and Joost Daamen, praised “the re-signification of images, both in the contemporary context and within the film itself, appealing to historical memory and reparations.The Docs Award for Best Catalan Film went to Grup natural, an empathetic and constructive look at adolescence by Nina Solà. “What initially appears as the portrait of a very specific institution becomes a universal, fun, and fresh film that never infantilizes its protagonists,” reads the verdict of the Docs&Cat Jury, made up of Adrià Lahuerta, Elena Molina, and Adrián Silvestre. Eligible were the Catalan productions in the festival, sponsored by La Xarxa Audiovisual Local (XAL). The Docs Public Award – Moritz also honored a Catalan documentary, Mares, by Ariadna Seuba, the journey toward motherhood of two women, full of hopes and frustrations.

The Official Jury granted three more awards. The Docs New Talent Award – Filmin, reserved for first features, recognized “the vital perspective on a mature and complex relationship in the twilight of both characters” of Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other, by Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet. The Docs Antaviana Award went to Timestamp, by Kateryna Gornostai, for “its persistent gaze on future generations of a country at war and its normalization within the educational system,” an homage to the daily struggle of students and teachers to keep schools open amid the war in Ukraine. Always, the beautiful debut by Deming Chen, received one of the festival’s new awards, the Docs Editing Award – AMMAC, “for its precise, observational approach to the ordinary, allowing an extraordinary poetic story to emerge.”

For the first time in the awards lineup, the Docs Journalistic Relevance Award – El Periódicowas presented to The Dialogue Police, by Susanna Edwards, with a Special Mention to Facing War, by Tommy Gulliksen.

Mr Nobody Against Putin, by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin, a witness to the transformation of a Ural school under Vladimir Putin’s new “patriotic education” policy, received the Amnesty International Catalonia Award, recognizing the film most committed to the defense of human rights.

Youth juries contributed four more winners to the 28th DocsBarcelona lineup. The DOC-U – 16nou Award went to the short Al rojo vivo. The Doc Around Europe Award was given to How Did I Get Here, 2unbreakable received the Docs&Teens Award by the teenage audience. The Young Jury Award – Reteena went to Khartoum.

Rounding out the awards is the verdict of the 2024 audience from the network of 70 Docs del Mes venues, DocsBarcelona’s circuit programming, which granted the Docs del Mes Award to Echo Of You. The Docs d’Honor Award, presented at the festival’s opening in recognition of the career achievements of outstanding professionals in documentary film history, was this year awarded to German producer Heino Deckert.

DocsBarcelona 2025 Award Winners

• Docs Award for Best Film: La memoria de las mariposas
• Docs Award for Best Catalan Film: Grup natural
• Docs New Talent Award – Filmin: Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other
• Docs Antaviana Award: Timestamp
• Docs Editing Award – AMMAC: Always
• Docs Journalistic Relevance Award – El Periódico: The Dialogue Police
  – Special Mention: Facing War
• Docs Public Award – Moritz: Mares
• DOC-U – 16nou Award: Al rojo vivo
• Doc Around Europe Award: How Did I Get Here
• Docs&Teens Award: 2unbreakable
• Young Jury Award – Reteena: Khartoum
• Docs del Mes Award: Echo Of You
• Amnesty International Catalonia Award: Mr Nobody Against Putin
• Docs d’Honor Award: Heino Decker

Nine projects took part in this year’s edition of DocsBarcelona’s Artistic Consultancies. It was a pleasure to meet the filmmakers, who came from all over the world: Ukraine, Portugal, India, Italy, France, Azerbaijan, Chile, Uruguay, Montenegro, Colombia, Argentina, Spain! Stories about Life and Love, Pain and Joy, Observation, Construction – rough cuts, early cut, close to post production. What a wonderful world documentaries depict, it’s all out there, go and get it, show, interpret, make it personal.

Conversation. Dialogue. Constructive criticism. Suggestions for improvement. 80 minutes.

It is my impression that the makers all took something to be useful for their further work in the editing room. Thanks to the tutors who turned up well prepared and ready to ask questions and say what they found strong and what was weak.

Thanks so much to the tutors Emma Davie, Cecilia Lidin, Robert Goodman, Montse Bartui and Pol Roig. An extra applause to the latter, who was the master of technique at the location, where 8 of the projects were presented. With zoom images of makers, who could not be present and with makers sitting in sofas responding to the tutors on screen – the three first mentioned. Bartui and Roig being in Barcelona.

I chose a photo from the project “Silence is the Enemy of the Sea” with Evgeny Rodin and Dina Karaman as directors of a film shot in Azerbaijan. Pol Roig was the tutor. Description from catalogue:

Muffled music seeps in through the thick white fog. Inside, people on the iron beds begin to stir awake under their snug wraps. The barred windows of their rooms face the vast, grumbling sea. The on-site radio plays songs in different languages—some are about the Great Mother Sea, in others the sea is a ruthless killer. Wake-up, meal, leisure, and nap time calls are made in Morse code. After meals, the residents lounge in the vast halls on sofas and carpets. They drift away to imaginary seas, ignoring the real one before them…

I did the selection of the projects. The organisation of the session was done perfectly by Claudia Valero. Thank you to all of you.