Cinepolitical: A Monthly Brief on Documentary
December's Essential Docs & Dialogues + New Magazine
We wrap up the tumultuous year that was with our final collection of films, commentary, and interviews from December. Here, read about two interesting DOK Leipzig panels, Truls Lie’s interview with two prominent intellectuals on today's Turkey, and reviews from our collaboration on the Media & Documentary Seminar at Ji.hlava IDFF. Happy Holidays and a safe and constructive 2025 from Modern Times Review, and see you in January at the Trieste Film Festival.
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News
Applications open for Ex Oriente Film documentary laboratory 2025
Sunny Side of the Doc 2025 opens calls for projects and applications
FIFDH announces 2025 details for Impact Days webinar
dok.incubator announces call for 2025 documentary submissions
Serbia and women filmmakers on focus at Trieste Film Festival 2025
The 2025 FIFDH Impact Days selections
Porto/Post/Doc 2024: The complete winners
Interviews
Pragmatism and repressive politics
This autumn, we met two intellectuals in Istanbul who discussed today's Turkey and attended a major conference on political economy there. Here, we examine the use of power, freedom of expression, the media, militarisation, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's political pragmatism.
To learn more about independent media in Turkey, I visited P24, the Centre for Culture and Political Debate, in the heart of Istanbul.
«Any help we can provide emerging filmmakers will be given.»
We speak with Adele Kohout, co-director of DOK.fest München, and Johanna von Websky, Assistant to the Managing Director, to delve deeper into the vision behind the Doc Around Europe platform and its potential to reshape the future of European documentary cinema.
Films
Becoming Outline
Director: Miriam Bajtala
Ji.hlava IDFF
Confronting the shame of poverty and domestic violence and the pursuit of self-liberation through education and art.
Dahomey
Director: Mati Diop
Ji.hlava IDFF
Blending nonfiction and magic, Mati Diop's Dahomey gives voice to looted statues while exploring the complexity of restitution.
Limites of Europe
Director: Apolena Rychlíková
Ji.hlava IDFF
The invisible economic labour of Eastern European workers.
The Bibi Files
Director: Alexis Bloom
Alexis Bloom's gripping exposé of the web of lies apparently woven by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to avoid corruption charges shows how one man's fear of jail has led to war and instability in the Middle East.
Reports
The rising application and possibilities of artificial intelligence in film production
The DOK Leipzig panel «Documentaries and Artificial Intelligence» tried to anticipate the consequences of the growing AI influence.
The fragile separation of documentary and fiction
DOK Leipzig organised a debate in different panels about the connections and interferences between documentary and fictional works.
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