The 25th Ji.hlava IDFF is halfway through.
The third day of the festival also dished out several premieres from the Czech Joy section. Among them was Votes for the President or Attempted Counterrevolution by Martin Kohout that captures the social and political events leading up to the 2018 presidential elections. The audience could also see the animated documentary Love, Dad by director Diana Cam Van Nguyen, who reflects on her relationship with her father. Heaven directed by journalist Tomáš Etzler, which takes viewers to a Chinese orphanage, and How I Became a Partisan by Vera Lacková, which tells the story of her great-grandfather, a Romani partisan, also had their world premieres.
The Inspiration Forum featured a discussion by gender studies legend Judith Butler. “My family said that if I study philosophy, I’ll never find a proper job. Well, I think I’m quite alright,” said Judith Butler. Polish women's rights activist Marta Lempart, who co-founded the National Women's Strike movement, also spoke on the topic of “equality and inequality”. And what will the Friday’s programme bring?
One of the highlights will be Cow by British Oscar-winner Andrea Arnold. It will be screed as part of the Constellations section that traditionally presents a selection of the cream of the world's film festivals. This year, the section comprises twenty documentaries. The protagonist of this time-lapse documentary is a dairy cow named Luma. The film follows the animal, whose life is reduced to the exhausting cycle of calf rearing and milk production, for several years.
Documentarian Jan Látal invites viewers into the world of aging Czech singer-songwriter Jan Nedvěd. This Time Is Not for Us follows the popular musician on what may be his last tour. “I like controversial figures. And Jan Nedvěd is one of them. Half the people love his work, the other half laugh at it. But I was wondering who Honza Nedvěd really is,” says the director.
The Opus Bonum section will treat the audience to the film A Letter to Nikola by the Greek director Hara Kaminara. The audiovisual letter to an unborn child is an intimate confession on the border between the personal and the social. The rescue ship Aquarius, whose crew helps refugees stranded in the stormy waters of the Mediterranean, is a space of imagination built on the humanistic message of a photographer of stories of human misfortune.
The festival section Reality TV will showcase director Erika Hníková’s Single Moms. The film draws attention to the social issue of single parenthood. The main characters of the film are three single mothers who find themselves in difficult life situations: moving out of their apartment, trying to reconcile work and family life or the absence of a partnership.
How to Kill a Cloud follows by Finnish director Tuija Halttunen follows meteorologist Hannele Korhonen who is challenged by a wealthy sheikh from the United Arab Emirates to try to invent artificial rain. The film will be screened in the Testimonies section.
Inspiration Forum
And what will be the topic of the day at the Inspiration Forum? About digital technologies and their potential to create a fairer world. Discussion entitled Gain without Pain will focus, among other things, on the fourth industrial revolution. The discussion will host Canadian economist Nick Srnicek whose new book Platform Capitalism offers a key to understanding innovations in large digital companies such as Google, Amazon and Alibaba. The programme will be available online at the festival’s Facebook profile.
