Modern Times Review turns to Inconvenient Films as the Vilnius-based festival opens its twentieth edition on 5 October.
Running 5 to 25 October under the theme «Moved By Cinema», the anniversary edition is the Baltic region’s only international human-rights documentary festival at this scale. Cinemas in Vilnius, Kaunas, Panevėžys, Klaipėda and Alytus host the screenings, and hundreds of libraries and an online programme extend them. The retrospective strand, 20 Years of Inconvenient Films, draws on titles the festival’s audience said stayed with them longest. Eight Lithuanian films are in the programme, and a new competitive strand for student shorts debuts this year. The festival's website lists the full line-up.
Inconvenient Films Marks 20 Years «Moved By Cinema» sets out the anniversary edition, from the audience-sourced retrospective that returns The Act of Killing and 5 Broken Cameras to the first Lithuanian cinema screening of Paris Is Burning. Inconvenient Films: «If you bring people who agree, you are talking to a mirror» is our interview with festival director Gediminas Andriukaitis, who traces the festival’s path from human-rights activism into documentary and explains why this edition builds its programme around the measured impact of individual films, with an opening watch party streamed in libraries across the country.
So far, nine reviews move across this year’s programme with four staying close to war and occupation. Cuba & Alaska rides with two Ukrainian combat medics, Yulia «Cuba» and Olexandra «Alaska», through chest-mounted camera footage and text messages that find dark humour under drone fire, and it was among the titles the festival’s own programmers singled out. In Poh Si Teng's Sundance-premiered debut, American Doctor follows three American physicians from Gaza hospitals to Senate offices at home. Habibi Hussein revisits a German NGO’s 2008 reopening of the Jenin cinema and the projectionist who repaired the equipment and received no thanks. Memory rebuilds a childhood in Grozny during the war with Russia through puppet shows and dollhouses.
The remaining five cover other terrain. 80 Angry Journalists watches Hungary’s Index.hu lose its editorial independence, then follows the roughly eighty staff who resigned together and went on to found Telex.hu. A Song Without Home spends years with Adeline, a trans woman from Georgia who was confined at home for eleven years and now lives in Vienna. Cutting Through Rocks profiles Sara Shahverdi, a midwife elected to a rural Iranian council who teaches girls to ride motorcycles and is later dismissed from her seat. Amazomania returns with a Swedish journalist to the Javari Valley, where memories of first contact with the Korubo differ sharply from his own and his claim on the photographs he took is contested. Taming the Garden follows century-old trees as they are uprooted from the Georgian coast for a powerful man’s private garden.
Read the complete Inconvenient Films coverage in Modern Times Review.
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