The small Balkan country of Bosnia and Herzegovina has faced particular energy challenges for years, complicated by corruption and ecological threats. Bosnian filmmaker Zlatko Pranjic teamed with Danish co-director Nanna Frank Møller for a troubling look at the toxic fallout of a chronic polluter, the ArcelorMittal steel plant near Zenica. The result, the doc “The […]

In Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival winner “Gray Zone,” Slovak director Daniela Meressa Rusnoková proves that the personal can be universal, reliving her son’s premature birth. “I’d had two children before, so I knew how it ‘should’ go. Suddenly, he was fighting for his life, in agony. I was in absolute shock. I realized how many […]

The dark origins of modern Slovak film are seldom discussed in Slovakia, says historian Petra Hanakova – and that’s precisely why she dedicated herself to digging through archives to unearth the unlikely wave of movies made there during World War II. Indeed, it’s sometimes overlooked that while the Czech lands were under Nazi occupation in […]

Gabriella Garcia Pardo, whose “Fenced” picked up the New Visions Award for most promising U.S. doc at Ji.hlava Film Festival, talks to Variety about the project, which focuses on something we barely notice yet know only too well: fences, which protect or divide. Depending on whom you ask. “It’s not so easy to say they […]

In Filip Remunda’s documentary “Happiness to All,” the Czech filmmaker portrays a characteristically off-kilter protagonist – and one who projects invincibility somehow tinged with doom. The film made its world premiere this week at the Ji.hlava Film Festival in the Czech Rep., where it won the best Central and Eastern European documentary award. Vitaly, a […]

Marek Šulík’s “Ms. President” was named the winner of the Opus Bonum section at Ji.hlava Documentary Festival Saturday. The film, which also opened the festival, was one of the buzziest titles this year, provoking discussions about upcoming U.S. elections and zooming onto the fifth president of Slovakia, Zuzana Čaputová – the first woman ever to […]