FestDocsNetwork

It is a perfect moment in history to start new collaborations with already acclaimed European festivals from Germany, France, Spain.

Festivals are meant to be celebrations of life and a meeting place for creativity, a market where opinions and ideas are exchanged and where collaborations come to life. Festivals are necessary for filmmakers to meet their audience, to celebrate films. Since documentaries usually take a long time before they reach their viewers, festivals acknowledge the filmmaker’s achievement and mark an important moment in the film completion process. 

This is why it is important to establish strong festival bonds and even more in times of social crisis. Now it is time to strengthen the ties, help each other with advice and thus support the art of filmmaking. At the moment, one such network is the FestDocs Network which helps us to make the best of the online festival edition to take advantage of the new online reality. Moreover, it gives us the opportunity to engage documentary filmmakers from faraway places to understand the differences of the European realities.

FestDocs Network started spontaneously between the German Doc.fest Munchen, the French FIPADOC from Biariz, the Spanish DocsBarcelona and MakeDox which decided to join their creative forces and different festival experiences so as to bring to the screen films from France, Spain, Germany and the Balkans, France, Spain and Germany before audiences that don’t have the opportunity to see realities from these countries. Which is why we will organize screenings locally but will also cross borders to reach the audiences from rural and other urban areas. 

This collaboration strengthens our festival markets and seeks possibilities for co-production of documentary films. We’ll therefore involve all three festivals in the CoProDox Forum pitching session and will discuss our future plans as a network, exchanging films from all the countries and attending each other’s festivals being one of the next logical steps.