September 22 the upcoming Vilnius International Documentary Film Festival (VDFF) invites you to rethink reality. The theme of this year's festival - reconstructions of reality - suggests looking at reality as a constantly changing, mobile medium that is freely manipulated by the observer's gaze. The festival will take place from September 22 to October 2, in Vilnius, Beautiful and in Alytus.
"Documentary cinema is not a direct reflection of reality. It is the reality constructed by the director or the main characters, a kind of reality architecture created by them. This year, we decided to invite the audience to think about where reality begins and ends in the documentary, as well as in the viewer's (sub)consciousness," Vilma Levickaitė, one of the organizers of the festival program, presents this year's theme.
In today's context - when the boundaries between real and fictional are not so easy to define - a particularly relevant topic is clearly unfolding from various angles in the films of the main program. In six new documentaries selected from prestigious festival repertoires, documentary stories unfold in inventive forms, from a satirical docu-fiction where a tourist can be sacrificed or turned into a ghost, to an archive of educational material about volcanoes that becomes a stunning cinematic spectacle.
The retrospective program invites you to get to know the Italian documentarian, anthropological filmmaker Cecilia Mangini (1927–2021). Working together with Pier Paolo Pasolini, the artist devoted her entire career as a director to non-canonical, borderline themes: during the period of industrialization, she recorded ancient rural rituals, the everyday life of marginalized people, and the position of women in patriarchal Italian society.
Turning to Ukrainian documentary and film research, the festival organizers invited Oleksandr Teliuk, archivist of the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center, to compile the thematic program. The special program "Chernobyl: Utopia and Apocalypse" offers a look at the atomic city with a view that deconstructs social utopia.
The screening and exhibition of the amateur film program "About Home and Friends" is dedicated to those interested in the less explored practices of documentary cinema. The audience will have the opportunity to get acquainted with the 7th century. Dec. 9-XNUMX Films of Lithuanian cinema lovers and everyday moments captured by them. Both viewing and visiting the exhibition are free.
The joint film program of the VDFF and the Architecture Foundation aptly responds to the theme of the festival. During the international architecture symposium "Erdvės politika" to be held in Vilnius, the festival will present an engaging film about the Ukrainian architect and painter Florian Yuriev and short films by the most famous Dutch documentary author Bert Haanstra.
The authentic features of the city of Vilnius and their transformations unfold in Eitvydas Doškaus' film "Here was Vilnius" (2021), which opens the festival. VDFF invites you to see and hear this urban symphony genre documentary for the first time in Lithuania in the old cinema hall of the Lithuanian Medical Library, where the film's soundtrack will be performed live during special screenings-concerts.
The 19th VDFF will be held in cinemas only: September 22 - October 2. – in Vilnius, September 28-30. Kaunas, September 26. - In Alytus.
