The Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival has announced the first details of the programme for its 30th edition, which will take place from October 23 to November 1 in the Czech Republic. The selection will combine international competitions, retrospectives, world premieres and industry events, with a special focus on documentaries that have helped transform society.
One of the main highlights will be Films That Changed the World, an anniversary section bringing together 13 films that have shaped public debate, contributed to legislative change or helped overturn wrongful convictions. The selected titles include Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies and Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.
“The 30 years of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival have borne witness to the transformation of documentary film, which has become one of the principal ways of understanding today’s increasingly complex and interconnected world,” said festival director Marek Hovorka.
The edition will also feature a retrospective of Vietnamese-American filmmaker, artist and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, as well as a celebration of the 80th anniversary of Prague’s FAMU film school. As part of the programme, Ji.hlava 30: Thinking Through Film, an audiovisual essay by Andrea Slováková and Janka Vlčková drawing on archival recordings from the festival’s three decades of history, will premiere.
International highlights include Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, Viktor Kossakovsky’s Trillion and Rithy Panh’s We Are the Fruits of the Forest.
The international competition Opus Bonum will comprise 14 films: ten world premieres, three international premieres and one European premiere. The main award, worth $10,000, will be contested by titles including Filip Remunda’s Love Exposed, which examines photographer Vlastimil Kula’s relationship with his daughter, and Nikola Klinger’s Land of Fire, set in a Canadian region affected by wildfires and the disappearances of Indigenous women.
The selection will also feature the world premieres of Yevhen Titarenko’s I See No Death, about Ukrainian drone operators, and Ania Winiarska’s Good Girls, which observes daily life inside a Catholic reformatory for teenage girls in the Polish city of Łódź. Meanwhile, Baltic UXO, by Agnė Dovydaitytė and Alexander Belinski, will receive its international premiere, while Éric Baudelaire’s For the Moon, made in collaboration with blind students in Paris, will screen as a European premiere.
Experimental cinema will have its place in Fascinations, one of the festival’s competition sections dedicated to contemporary explorations of audiovisual language. The section will host the world premiere of the Argentine short film Batalla bajo el cielo rosa, directed by Franco Figueroa. First Lights, dedicated to documentary feature debuts, will also feature an Argentine film with the world premiere of Ariel Feldman’s Espero te enamores, an autobiographical and introspective documentary about love in an era marked by increasingly fleeting relationships.
The Czech competition, Czech Joy, will bring together 27 films. Announced world premieres include Pavel Štingl’s Jaroslav Seifert: A Rhythm Outside Time, Mariana Macháňová’s Birdie and Eliška Cílková Andršová’s Up Again, which follows young figure-skating champion Barbora Vránková.
Beyond the screenings, the festival will host a new edition of the Inspiration Forum, welcoming David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything, and Samaneh Moafi of Forensic Architecture. The industry programme will run from October 27 to 30, with a special focus on Montenegro through project pitches and a panel discussion.
The New Visions Forum market will showcase projects from Europe, the United States, and East and Southeast Asia, while the Emerging Producers 2027 programme will introduce 18 emerging producers. The industry agenda will also include matchmaking sessions, project roundtables, discussions on financing and working conditions in Czech documentary filmmaking, presentations from the Future Memory Lab and a session on funding opportunities through Creative Europe MEDIA.
Three decades after its founding, Ji.hlava is preparing an edition that combines a historical reassessment of documentary cinema, the discovery of new voices and a discussion of the medium’s potential to interpret and intervene in contemporary reality.