-
The documentary film festival celebrates a quarter of a century of life with a program that can also be seen through Filmin
projection of ‘navalny’where the Canadian director daniel roher portrays the figure of the renowned opponent of Vladimir Putin, will inaugurate the International Documentary Film Festival of Barcelona (Docs Barcelona), which celebrates this year 25th edition from May 18 to 29. It will have an extensive film program that will be screened in the Aribau, CCCB and Filmoteca de Catalunya cinemas and that can also be followed virtually through the Filmin platform.
There will be two weeks during which you can enjoy a selection of 29 feature films and 12 short films who seek to continue bringing the documentary genre to the public. “In these 25 years the viewer’s gaze has changed, the documentary has crossed the screen and is now part of a society that resorts to cinematography to explain itself,” says Joan González, director of the festival.
special screenings
In ‘Navalny’, Roher focuses on the poisoning he suffered Alexei Navalny on a plane ride from Siberia to Moscow, and in the subsequent fight he undertook to find out who was behind his assassination attempt. A true story told in the purest style of a spy thriller, which unfortunately becomes more relevant in connection with the current war unleashed in Ukraine.
And it is that the documentary genre closely deals with issues of great social impact. “Several of the films that are part of this edition create very revealing connections with today’s world and function as a loudspeaker against injustice, also opening the door to imagining new worlds,” says Pol Roig, director of the festival’s programming .
It is also the case of ‘Terror Contagion’, by Laura Poitraswhich exposes the activities of the Israeli company NSO Group, creator of the Pegasus spy software, used to control the phones of some 60 people related to the Catalan independence movement.
The Robin Hood of the 21st century
Among the six Catalan productions selected to be part of the DocsBarcelona billboard, ‘Robin Bank’, by Anna Giralt, an intimate ‘thriller’ about Catalan activist Enric Duranknown as the Robin Hood of the 21st century. He managed to extract half a million euros in credits requested from a quarantine of banking entities and allocated them to social projects as a denunciation of the abusive practices exercised by financial entities. Own Duran, sentenced to prison and wanted and captured, will present the film virtually at the festival.
‘Dear Sara’directed by Patricia Frankis a movie about Afghan women’s activism who fight for their rights. It tells the story of Sara, the first female taxi driver in the country, before the return of the taliban. “The film is the portrait of a powerful woman who breaks down barriers in a patriarchal society, but also represents a part of her past figure that she has now lost by being forced to leave her home and go into exile in Portugal,” explains the director. her.
International news also appears in ‘Erasmus in Gaza’, by Chiara Avesani and Matteo Delbowho accompany an Italian medical student during his Erasmus, the first non-Palestinian to study at the country’s university.
Russian pride of the past
It is also narrated in a very personal way by the filmmaker Laura Sisteró in ‘Tolyatti Adrift’, that offers us a trip to the Russian city of Tolyatti, a town that in the past symbolized socialist pride for its powerful automobile industry, which is now a place without a future. Sisteró enters this place in the company of a group of young people who rescue the iconic Lada cars of an abandoned factory to transform them into a means of rebellion and expression of their desperation.
Related news
Silvia Subirosmeanwhile, presents a family story through the experience of his grandfather Josep Mercader, founder of the El Motel restaurant in Figueres. ‘The kitchen of the homes’ ends up becoming an alternative thread to the history of his family’s kitchen, rediscovering the forgotten legacy of Anna Berether grandmother.
And an ecological story is what it offers Pere Puigbert in ‘El vent que ensmou’a production that calls for the conservation of nature in the Empordà, focusing on the wind energy produced in the territory.