24th WATCH DOCS International Film Festival

WATCH DOCS is the first festival hosted by MSN Warsaw’s in-house cinema, KINOMUZEUM. The festival inauguration of this new location on the cinema map of Warsaw promises to be exciting. Ten days of engaged documentaries, over a dozen meetings with Polish and foreign filmmakers, panel discussions on such topics as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or the legal rights of animals. Global, Polish and Warsaw premieres, documentaries, experiments, archival materials … films that will touch the whole audience.

The New Polish Film Competition will be held for the first time as part of the WATCH DOCS program. There are seven documentaries entered in this section battling for the two competition prizes. At KINOMUZEUM we are screening films including Such Feeling by Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, an unpretentious manifesto of the new, queer Warsaw (Warsaw premiere on 22 November at 20:30, followed by a meeting with the creators of the film); Flowers of Ukraine by Adelina Borets, a savage wartime documentary comedy playing out at a Kyiv apartment complex (Warsaw premiere on 22 November at 18:00, followed by a meeting with the director); and Being Mikołaj by Aurelia Frydrych, with great tenderness accompanying the title character and his father during the challenging process of transition (world premiere on 24 November at 17:00, followed by a meeting with the filmmakers and the main character). We also invite you to the Warsaw premiere of Tomasz Wolski’s new film A Year in the Life of a Country, juxtaposing communist propaganda with unpublished photos from the archives of the communist security services, shedding new light on the period of martial law in Poland (December 1981 – July 1983) (26 November at 21:00, followed by a meeting with the film’s creators).

The screenings outside of the competition include two films by this year’s winner of the WATCH DOCS special prize, the Filipina director Ramona S. Diaz. The impressive And So It Begins (which premiered at this year’s Sundance Festival) conveys the stunning spectacle of a unique election campaign with millions of extras (24 November at 19:30, followed by a meeting with the director), while Motherland is a fascinating depiction of an unusual matriarchal universe, one of the world’s biggest maternity hospitals in the center of an Asian metropolis (25 November at 21:00, following by a meeting with the director). The screening of From Ground Zero (27 November at 18:00), the Palestinian candidate for an Oscar, a collective film using documentary and other techniques to capture the reality of the Gaza Strip from the perspective of its inhabitants, will be followed by a debate on prosecution of war crimes in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. On Wednesday, 27 November, at 21:30 we invite you to a special screening of Escaping Censorship, a set of unique short documentary films produced between 1963–1985 at the Sahia studio in Romania. The studio became a refuge for filmmakers who were prohibited by the communist authorities from making films for wider audiences.

The 24th WATCH DOCS IFF will be held from 22 November to 1 December 2024. For detailed information about the program, tickets, prices, and festival events, visit www.watchdocs.pl.

Organizer: Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights