22nd Documentary Film Festival

Dear Sirs,

We are glad to inform you that the 22nd Documentary Film Festival – 22nd FDF, originally scheduled for March 2020, will take place between 9 and 16 June 2020. The programme has not been changed. Please see the schedule of screenings at  www.fdf.si.

The 22nd Documentary Film Festival is being held in conformity with the Government of the Republic of Slovenia’s current measures introduced to limit the spread of the novel Coronavirus. In accordance with the Ordinance on the temporary restriction of the gathering of people at public places and areas in the Republic of Slovenia (Official Gazette RS, no. 69/20) events admitting up to 50 people have been allowed. If the restrictions are lifted by the beginning of the festival, some Cankarjev dom screenings will be relocated to a bigger venue, Linhart Hall.

Documentaries Are Back!

When it comes to box office revenue June cannot compete with March, but this sorry fact has not dampened our ethusiasm for finding an alternative date when the restrictions imposed to contain the spread of the novel Coronavirus were lifted. Documentaries will be the first to again light up the movie screens, perhaps this will be the first film festival in post-Covid times, that is, the period when life is returning back to normal. It will definitely be an event that places film back into its natural environment. The thirty-year-old slogan “one is never alone in a cinema” could in these times be transliterated into “one is never alone while watching a film”. We got used to seeing films on TV- or computer screens during quarantine, but I most sorely missed the collective vieweing experience, an experience manifested most aptly in movie theatres.

The June-held Documentary Film Festival will not be your regular film festival; but “a festival of distance”. There will be no socializing, professional meetings, post-screening exchanges of opinions. Nevertheless, we aim to preserve some of the regular features, e.g. the awards. In a virtual environment, the jury will announce the winner of the Best Human Rights Award. This will be a small, but important contribution to getting everyday life back to normal. We are fed up with extreme conditions, symbolically encampsulated by State Funeral and Jawline. The first deals with mass idolisation of a dead ruler and the second the self-sufficiency of the virtual world and communication through applications. To put it another way, this kind of state funeral would not have been viable in 2020 due to mandatory social distancing and impersonal online communication is something that we are exceedingly wearied of.

Simon Popek
Cankarjev dom Film Programme Director