Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival’s industry platform Agora has gained prominence among documentary professionals and become one of the key events in the winter calendar. Documentary Magazine spoke to Vergou and several professionals in attendance to take stock of this year’s market, examining content trends and the current climate for business. When discussing content trends, Vergou focuses on the growing conversation about supporting filmmakers who lack access to national funding due to political reasons or who have been forced to flee their home countries due to persecution. This year, Agora, in collaboration with DOK Leipzig’s DOK Industry, launched the Doc Together initiative to provide practical support.
European Media
No summary could ever do justice to what Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez has created through his audiovisual-textual collage Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024). The year 1960, famously called the “Year of Africa,” serves as the political, social, and cultural matrix on which Grimonprez builds his manifold narrative—moving back and forth in time and space, layering sound, image, and text with texture and depth. Now an Oscar nominee, the documentarian comes well-prepared, armed with the quintessential skills of an avid researcher and a seasoned orator, opening new tabs in our minds with each question while anticipating potential criticisms with humility and curiosity. Documentary magazine sat down with Grimonprez to discuss Soundtrack to a Coup d’État in his format of choice: a dialogue.
Makarenko, a public school in the Parisian suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, is the subject of Elementary , the latest vérité study from renowned French
After presenting A Brief Excursion in 2017, Igor Bezinović returns to Rotterdam to showcase his latest documentary, titled Fiume o Morte!, in the Tiger competition. The Croatian director uses dramatic reconstructions and nonfiction interludes to explore the complex figure of Italian poet, playwright, and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938). In his conversation with Documentary, Bezinović unpacks the making of his long-gestated project, its peculiar aesthetic choices, its ambitions, and its worryingly timely connections between past and present.
The 2024 edition of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam opened shortly after the world learned of two changes in leadership. One was at
There is a certain spectacle to which the bullfight—or the corrida de toros , the sport’s less colloquial Spanish name—lends itself, which is at once
In The Propagandist , Luuk Bouwman walks us through how Jan Teunissen, a wealthy Dutch scion, went from directing the first feature film in the
I first encountered the work of Milo Rau back in 2020, when his reimagining of the story of Jesus, The New Gospel, premiered in Venice. Set in the
On March 15, 1990, French author and ethnologist Jacques Kerchache published a manifesto in Libération signed by 150 artists, scholars, and
With films like The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (2011) and Concerning Violence (2014), Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson has become known for his