The XV International Documentary Film Festival Artdocfest will take place in Moscow on the usual dates from March 31 to April 7, 2022.
In the spring we had many events that made us think again that the life of the most independent film screening in Russia is under threat, but we continued to prepare for the next festival. In a short time the Artdocfest team not only managed to hold IDFF Artdocfest/Riga 2021 with “home delivery”, Riga Documentary Film Symposium, Artdocfest/Riga Pitching-2021, visiting sessions of Artdocfest in Vladivostok, Ufa, as well as Georgia and Montenegro, but also to collect the program of the 15th anniversary festival. From May to the end of August we received 2895 applications!
We have received almost three thousand films and we hope to show about 100 of them, but you can start watching 21 works right now! We are announcing our first program ot the ArtdocNet competition with the films made publicly available by copyright holders.
All films of the program and information about them are available here
Viewers can watch films and traditionally vote in the Artdocfest Facebook group for their favorite works. Voting will last until April 6. The winners of the competition, including the winner of the Audience Prize for the best film of ArtdocNet, will be announced later.
The jury of ArtdocNet:
- Alexey Malobrodsky, theater manager and producer (Russia)
- Elena Fanailova, poet, journalist and columnist (Russia)
- Elena Lukyanova, public and political figure, co-founder of the Free University board (Latvia).
Based on the jury voting results there will be awarded the Best Film Prize, the Best Director Prize and the Special Jury Prize.
This year, ArtdocNet has finally taken shape as a professional competition, which includes both industrial works and debuts. The program includes 21 films as well as in the main competition. Almost all of them were filmed in Russia, two are joint productions with Germany and the United States, and two are from Belarus and Latvia. The 2022 program is distinguished from all previous years by the incredible composition of the participants. Almost all the authors, directors and producers of the selected films are professional documentary filmmakers (Alexander Elkan, Zaka Abdrakhmanova, Maxim Shved, Andrey Silverstov, Konstantin Selin, Roman Super and Ivan Proskuryakov) and journalists (Ilya Varlamov, Sasha Sulim, Anna Nemzer, Maria Borzunova, Vladimir Servinovsky, Leonid Parfenov, Alexei Pivovarov) with extensive experience in film and television, with considerable creative baggage, festival awards.
Among the production companies there are many well-known media outlets: Novaya Gazeta, BBC, Radio Liberty, TV channels Rain and Current Time. The last three media outlets, like many of our other friends have received for their independence the label of a “foreign agent” from the Russian authorities this year. But this will not affect our desire to collaborate with them and show their films to the audience.
Vitaly Mansky, President of Artdocfest: “For Artdocfest there are no foreign agents, undesirable organizations and other labels distributed by the authorities. For us the only criteria is a real honest talented contemporary cinema and its authors. This is the kind of movie we are looking for, selecting and presenting to our viewer. This cinema helps us to be people, but not what authorities in Russia think we are.”