CineLink Industry Days Presents Documentary Activities Including Docu Talents from the East Selection and Esteemed Juries

Documentary projects often become most vulnerable precisely when their creative direction is becoming clear. A strong cut does not by itself secure completion, international positioning or a meaningful life beyond the first festival presentation. CineLink’s documentary activities respond to this gap by supporting individual projects while also questioning the wider conditions that determine whether strong films can be completed, positioned and sustained. This year’s main documentary activities are concentrated on 16 and 17 August. At their centre is Docu Rough Cut Boutique, the long-running programme jointly developed by CineLink Industry Days and the Balkan Documentary Center, which brings five feature-length documentaries in advanced editing to Sarajevo. Alongside it, Docu Talents from the East, organised by the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, presents seven projects from Central and Eastern Europe at production or post-production stage. On 16 August, the projects from both programmes will be screened and presented to international decision-makers. The awards attached to the programmes are an important part of this process, providing practical resources and professional opportunities that can help projects convert their presentation in Sarajevo into further development, completion and circulation. Yet supporting individual films also requires looking critically at the systems through which they must travel. 

As part of CineLink Talks on 17 August, two interconnected panels examine the conditions that shape the positioning and longer life of documentary cinema. The first panel looks at how responsibility for a documentary is shared, and often fragmented, mong producers, markets, festivals, broadcasters, sales agents and distributors once the immediate attention surrounding financing, selection or a premiere has passed. The second moves from responsibility to evidence. Documentary films reach viewers through festivals, television, specialised platforms, educational institutions and community screenings, but much of this circulation is recorded inconsistently or not at all. The discussion will consider which indicators matter, who should collect them and how information could be shared across the sector to produce a more credible picture of documentary reach. The aim is to make audiences that currently remain invisible more legible to funders, policymakers, distributors and cultural institutions, and to strengthen the basis on which future support and circulation strategies are designed. Documentary cinema will remain present in the second half of CineLink Industry Days through two projects selected for CineLink Work in Progress, where they will gain access to international sales agents, festival programmers, distributors, funds and post-production partners. Across these activities, CineLink works both with the films themselves and with the structures surrounding them - strengthening projects while examining what the documentary field must provide for them to reach completion, audiences and a sustained international life.

 

 

Docu Talent Award | Granted to the most promising project from the region of Central and Eastern Europe

 

DAFilms Distribution Award | 3,000 EUR in-kind DAFilms Distribution Award covers international VOD release on DAFilms (including Americas, Europe, Asia) for two years

 

 

Martichka Bozhilova  | Agitprop

Carmen Gray | The Film Verdict

Nina Numankadić | DAFilms

Jarmila Outratová | IDFF Ji.hlava

Ognjen Glavonić | Non-Aligned Films

 

 

Director: Kristina Spassovska

Producer: Kristina Spassovska

Production Company: Bellevue Kino

Country: Bulgaria

 

Shifting between reality and fiction, living and undead creatures are hanging around a decaying family apartment in the oldest neighbourhood of Sofia, where a film crew rehearses a movie that will never be made.

 

Director: Bohdan Prykhodko

Producer: Eva Zurian  

Production Company: IMA Bolero

Country: Ukraine

 

In Kramatorsk, fifteen kilometres from the frontline, municipal workers maintain a garden, an island of order beside destruction. Their meditative labour contrasts with the threat of evacuation and the slow disintegration of the world around them.

 

Director: Michał Bielawski

Producers: Maciej Kubicki, Aleksandra Dur

Production Company: Telemark

Country: Poland

 

A group struggling with climate-related depression begins therapy, turning inward to confront their fears and rediscover hope for themselves and the planet.

 

Director: Filip Remunda

Producers: Tereza Horská, Vít Klusák, Filip Remunda

Co-producers: Hanka Kastelicová, Tereza Bóna Keilová, Peter Kerekes, Anna Mach Rumanová, Saša Dlouhý 

Production Company: Hypermarket Film

Co-production Companies: HBO, Kerekes Film, FREESAM

Countries: Czech Republic, Slovakia 

 

He was famous for what he saw.  I’m the one he missed. A tragi-comedy about love, fame, and what got left out of the frame.

 

Director: Dzhovani Gospodinov

Producers: Bady Minck, Alexander Dumreicher-Ivanceanu

Production Companies: AMOUR FOU Luxembourg, Sen Film

Countries: Luxembourg, Slovakia

 

Ora et Labora portrays Germany‘s oldest Benedictine monastery at a critical moment of transition, exposing the fragile balance between faith, authority, and existence.

 

Director: Réka Pigniczky

Producers: Julianna Ugrin, Barnabas Gerő, Hanka Kastelicova (HBO), Eva Rybkova

Production Company: 56Films

Country: Hungary

 

As Hungary approaches a historic political turning point, filmmaker Réka Pigniczky pursues an elusive interview with Viktor Orbán while navigating deep political divisions within her own family, which forceing her to confront whether her country has truly learned how to live with democracy.

 

Director: Sára Prokopová

Producer: Tereza Tokárová

Production Company: Cinepunkt

Country: Slovakia

 

As a new political establishment in Slovakia begins to reshape the public broadcaster, its employees face a turning point that raises questions about the future of public media and their role within it. Through the perspective of those who oppose the transformation, the film captures a local story that many around the world may recognize as their own.

 

 

 

 

HBO Award | €2,000

Avanpost Award | in kind post-production services worth €20,000

DOK Leipzig Preview Award | invitation to present a project at DOK Leipzig

Movies that Matter Award | invitation to present a project at Movies that Matter

East Doc Caravan Award | invitation to join the East Doc Caravan festival distribution initiative

 

 

Eugen Kelemen | AVANPOST

Carmina Orozco López | Dok Leipzig

Hanka Kastelicová | HBO 

Eric Seleky | Movies that Matter

 

Directors: Altinaï Petrovitch Njegosh, François Fleury

Producers: Altinaï Petrovitch Njegosh, Dominique Welinski, Frédéric Chaudier

Production Companies: BIENVENUE PRODUCTIONS, AIE AIE AIE FILMS

Countries: Montenegro, France

 

French maestro Marc Korovitch takes over the Montenegrin Symphony Orchestra and reconnects with his roots. On the eve of the country’s entry into the European Union, he dreams of conducting Don Giovanni. 

 

Directors: Peter Akar, Rita Balogh

Producer: Rita Balogh

Production Company: OTHER FILMS

Country: Hungary  

 

Co-created with GenZ teens over 6 years from high school graduation, this raw doc blends self-shot and observational footage as they search for an adult self, facing identity crisis, depression, love.  

 

Director: Lucija Marčec

Producers: Ida Barac, Ema Mikolaci

Co-producer: Michael Sikora

Production Company: Academy of Dramatic Art Zagreb

Co-production company: Lonely Production

Countries: Croatia, Czech Republic

 

Does the discrimination ever change or does it only change its victims?

 

Directors: Georgi Totev, Maria Cheresheva

Producers: Svetoslav Draganov, Georgi Totev

Production Company: Cineaste Maudit production, LENS2LENS

Country: Bulgaria

 

Two women – a Palestinian in Gaza and a Bulgarian Jew – defy history through a twelve-year friendship that becomes an urgent mission of survival and quiet resistance during the 2023 war.

 

Director: Selen Çatalyürekli

Producer: Zeyneb Gültekin

Country: Türkiye

 

In southwest Turkey, village women lead a defiant stand against coal mining threatening their forest, homes, and future, transforming themselves as they fight for land and life.