16th Edition of Beldocs Unveils Full Lineup Including 9 World premieres

Festival - 13.04.2023.

Special sections dedicated to Berlin’s Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and Greek Cinema

Beldocs has unveiled the rich and versatile festival program of its latest edition, to take place May 10-17 in Belgrade, Serbia where this boutique Eastern European film festival focusing on non-fiction cinema takes place each year.

The festival will open with the Serbian premiere of Mladen Kovačević’s Another Spring about the 1972 smallpox epidemic in Yugoslavia. Kovačević will be present in person to present the film, alongside its main narrator, the epidemiologist Zoran Radovanović.

The program will boast 105 films, among which 9 world, 4 international premieres, as well as 30 developing projects in different phases of production. The unique and daring films by both renowned and young authors from all over the world make this year’s selection highly actual and relevant. This year’s festival video has been directed by Dušan Čavić and Dušan Šaponja, the winners of the 2012 Beldocs Grand Prix for the film The Battery Man. The authors are founders of Ciklotron production and the Marka Žvaka series.

The International Competition will include the World premiere of Territory of Imagination by Paula Maľárová, Cisco Kid by Emily Kaye Allen, Rotterdam selection ThIIIrd by Karim Kassem, Cinema du reel selection Adieu Sauvage by Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento, The Other Profile by Armel Hostiou, Like an Island by Tizian Buchi, The Curse by Maria Kaur Bedi & Satindar Singh Bedi, Bloom by Fanie Pelletier, Forms of Forgetting by Burak Çevik and Landshaft by Daniel Kötter.

The Serbian Competition will consist of 12 feature-length and short films. In addition to the opener Another Spring, the section will also present the IDFA selections Invoked by last year’s Beldocs winners Luka Papić and Srđa Vučo and Balls by Gorana Jovanović, Flotacija by Eluned Zoë Aiano, Alesandra Tatić, which will also be in the running for the Audentia Award, DOC NYC selection I’m People, I Am Nobody by Svetislav Dragomirović, A Field Guide to Coastal Fortifications by Tijana Petrović, End of the Road by Ivana Todorović, Reznica by Davor Marinković and World premieres of Portrait of a Dying Giant by Stefan Đorđević, Aurora’s Dream by Dragana Jovanović, Boogie & Demons by Ivan Šijak, And the River Still Flows by Jelena Radenović.

The domestic competitive program brings 12 films that make the selection intriguing and memorable with their peculiarity. Among the authors, we have debutants as well as award-winning filmmakers. The festival will start with Mladen Kovačević’s film “Another Spring”, while selection also shows the film Invoked by last year’s Beldocs winners Luka Papić and Srđa Vučo. The Serbian competitive program besides the abovementioned titles is also made of And the River Still Flows (Jelena Radenović), A Field Guide to Coastal Fortifications (Tijana Petrović), Aurora’s Dream (Dragana Jovanović), Flotation (Eluned Zoë Aiano, Alesandra Tatić), Boogie & Demons (Ivan Šijak), Balls (Gorana Jovanović), End of the Road (Ivana Todorović), I’m People, I Am Nobody (Svetislav Dragomirović), Portrait of a Dying Giant (Stefan Đorđević), and Reznica (Davor Marinković).

“We are trying to make each Beldocs better than the last one. Along with the great domestic and international competitive program, this year will have 2 master classes dedicated to experimental film within the Meteors selection. The first master class by American director Travis Wilkerson deals with the relationship between personal and objective memories on screen. The second is by a Slovak filmmaker Viera Čákanyová who creates films that represent a blend of documentary and Sci-Fi. I am also happy that we have established cooperation with the Institute for Film and Video Art Arsenal from Berlin and that we will show 5 carefully picked films from their collection under their patronage”, mentioned Marko Grba Singh, Beldocs festival art director.

He also presented 10 other titles that will find their place within the International competition program: Cisco Kid (Emily Kaye Allen), The Other Profile (Armel Hostiou), Like an Island (Tizian Buchi), The Curse (Maria Kaur Bedi, Satindar Singh Bedi), Bloom (Fanie Pelletier), Forms of Forgetting (Burak Çevik), Landshaft (Daniel Kötter), Territory of Imagination (Paula Maľárová), Thiiird (Karim Kassem), Adieu Sauvage (Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento).

“Amazing news that made us very happy is that Beldocs was elected to host the prestigious Eurimages Audentia Award brought by the Council of Europe Eurimages fund. Last year we spoke about the golden age of documentary film, next the most prestigious European film awards, Venetian Golden Lion and Golden Bear in Berlin, were awarded to documentaries, and now for the first time a documentary film festival has been chosen to host the prestigious Eurimages Audentia Award. We are especially glad because the creative documentary is becoming more acknowledged within the audiovisual industry as well as with the audience“, Beldocs director Mara Prohaska Marković pointed out.

This year’s Eurimages Audentia Award competition includes the following films: Flotacija (Alesandra Tatić, Eluned Zoe Aiano), Bloom (Fanie Pelletier), Cage Survivor (Irina Boiko), Notes from Eremocene (Viera Čákanyová), Human Flowers of Flesh (Helena Wittmann), KaprCode (Lucie Králová), Look What You Made Me Do (Coco Schrijber), Band (Álfrún Örnólfsdóttir), Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Anna Hints), Apolonia, Apolonia (Lea Glob), Polaris (Ainara Vera), and Tolyatti Adrift (Laura Sistero).

“The Eurimages Fund, which looks forward to this partnership as well as to this particularly promising selection of films, wishes the 16th edition of Beldocs every success!”

Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art will be honored with a retrospective, while a special focus section will feature the best of contemporary Greek documentaries, including Stavros Petropoulos’s Microbiome and Yorgos Goussis’ Arm Wrestler. This year’s special section will have the theme of The Future of Freedom.

The non-competitive sections Fireworks, Meteors, Prime Time and Breeze will include latest works by Sergei Loznitsa, James Benning, Stig Björkman, Mantas Kvedaravicius, Jørgen Leth, André Bonzel, Helena Wittmann, Lav Diaz, João Pedro Rodrigues and Ruben Östlund among others.

Thanks to numerous partnerships with international and European film festivals as well as numerous international audiovisual industry contributors, Beldocs positions itself as the main audio-visual industry hub in this part of Europe and its importance as a festival places it not only on the European but on the international festival map. This is supported by the following active content: Beldocs Industry Days, Connecting Futures, Beldocs Teen, Mini Doc, and others.

Beldocs Industry Days is dedicated to encouraging new contacts, collaborations, and co-productions among film professionals from Western Balkan countries, Baltic States, Post-Soviet Media, South Caucasus countries, and Western Europe in order to further the distribution of European audiovisual works. Beldocs Industry Days 2023 will feature training and project development workshops for young talents, public presentations of documentary film projects at the Beldocs Pitching Forum, panels, masterclasses, and matchmaking sessions, as well as the operation of the Beldocs Market video library, to achieve this goal.

At the Beldocs Pitching Forum 18 documentary film projects in various stages, from development to post-production, will be presented to a group of international industry representatives – TV channels, festivals, sales agents and distribution companies.

In addition to the Beldocs Pitching Forum, we hold the Producers Meet Producers networking event, where participants, guest and local producers can talk about various filmmaking topics, as well as two workshops aimed at developing film projects – Beldocs XR Academy, which focuses on virtual reality and augmented reality projects, and Balkan Young Talents, which focuses on promising young filmmakers from the Western Balkans region.

We offer a number of industry panels and masterclasses with an emphasis on independent movie theaters and documentary film curating as part of the Beldocs Market, which this year will bring together over 150 guests, both filmmakers and industry representatives.

Beldocs team considers diversity as one of the basic principles of society and aspires to allow access to screenings and accompanying events to everyone. Therefore, both the official festival website and program catalog provide information about the program’s accessibility to sensitive groups.

Beldocs is carried out with the support of the European Union through the Creative Europe MEDIA program, the Republic of Serbia Ministry of Culture and Information, The City of Belgrade Secretariat for Culture, the European Council, EU Delegation to Serbia, Film Center Serbia, Greek Film Center, Danish Film Institute, Australian Embassy, Embassies of Portugal, Slovenia, and Israel, Goethe Institute, Austrian Cultural Forum, Italian Cultural Center, OSCE Mission to Serbia, Al Jazeera Balkans TV, DOX TV, Insider TV, as well as ORION Telekom.

About Beldocs

Beldocs IDFF, one of the leading international documentary film festivals in this part of Europe, is held annually in May in Belgrade. Founded in 2008, it is divided into 12 programme units and it is organising over 100 premiere screenings every year, held at over 7 locations during the 8 days of the Festival. The Beldocs Festival presents 6 awards in 4 competition programmes. In addition to film screenings, it hosts a series of panel discussions, Master Class lectures and industry workshops, with cash prizes for the development of future films. The work of the Beldocs IDFF is supported by more than 200 partners in Serbia, the region and Europe. A creative team of over 20 members is behind the Festival, including film, design and art experts. Since 2017, Beldocs is supported by MEDIA of the European Union and has been a partner in the following European projects: #europeanfilmchallenge, AVA Doc, Moving Cinema, Young4Film, Connecting Futures and it is a member of the European Documentary Network. For more information, visit www.beldocs.rs.

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