New Visions Forum highlights diverse documentary projects

The Ji.hlava New Visions Forum and Market at the 30th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival featured a variety of documentary projects at different stages of development, including European and international co-productions. These projects explored themes such as family archives, political histories, and the blending of documentary with animation, performance, and staged sequences.

Ali Razi's project explores war memory

Ali Razi’s project Archiveless Memories, for an Imaginary Museum examines the unresolved memory of the Iran–Iraq War through landscapes, family images, and the experiences of protagonist and co-creator Nawal Sharifi. The filmmaker contrasts Tehran’s war museum with devastated family palm groves, questioning how official accounts of conflict coexist with private loss.

Michał Stankiewicz's documentary expands collaboration

Michał Stankiewicz is expanding his collaboration with the late American singer-songwriter and geologist Cat Janice into a 75-minute documentary essay. The film, built around recordings from her final years, invites viewers to physically participate. An associated XR experience premiered at Venice Immersive in 2026 and is also selected for IDFA DocLab.

Yelyzaveta Myshkalenko's film investigates Stalinist crimes

Yelyzaveta Myshkalenko’s debut feature investigates the Bykivnia mass graves near Kyiv through the story of three Ukrainian cultural figures who sought to expose Stalinist crimes in the 1960s. The hybrid documentary combines archival material, contemporary images of the forest, and charcoal animation. The project follows her short hybrid documentary Farewell, My Tree.

Dominika Kováčová and Kilhan Wittock's project uses family archive

Dominika Kováčová and Kilhan Wittock’s debut feature grew out of a family discovery: hundreds of reels of 16mm footage, letters, and scientific records belonging to Wittock’s great-grandfather, the ophthalmologist Benedetto Strampelli. The archive is brought into dialogue with contemporary encounters, including a blind woman in Senegal and a blind Belgian ornithologist.

Ondřej Vavrečka's film addresses war and storytelling

Ondřej Vavrečka’s project Mythos follows filmmaker Artur Aristakisian, whose storytelling becomes the starting point for a hybrid documentary about listening and imagination. Initially conceived as a slow, poetic encounter, the project changed after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, bringing political pressure into a film concerned with how narratives can sustain or confine people.

Laura Amna Stauth and Francesca Bertin's project revisits family history

Laura Amna Stauth and Francesca Bertin’s project The House follows Stauth returning to her family’s former cotton plantation in the Nile Delta after her mother’s death. Photographs, letters, and memories of the women in her family gradually lead beyond the estate’s walls to the surrounding village and the descendants of plantation workers. A film shot in the house in 1933 supplies another layer, bringing an earlier representation of romance and class into dialogue with the present.