The jubilee 15th edition of the Creative Documentary Film Festival "MakeDox" will be held from August 15 to 22 in the traditional spaces of Kurshumli an, Museum of Macedonia, Suli an, MKC and the new space "Laboratory" in Skopje. The festival will be held with the motto "Digging emotions through time".

The main press conference for the festival was held on August 8 in MCC, and the festival program was presented by Darko Nabakov, executive director of the festival, Petrula Veljanovska, program coordinator of MakeDox, and Sarah Ferro, head of the industry program of MakeDox.

- We are happy that this year at the 15th edition of "MakeDox", when we are celebrating one of our small jubilee, dedicated to cinematographic activity and archival materials, to their preservation, restoration and digitization, as well as to their creative use in documentary film, we have the opportunity to dig and hunt emotions through time, to recreate memories and reconstruct situations... Precisely for this reason, we will show a diverse program of documentaries, both new and older, which are abundant in archival material, with a special emphasis on documentaries that have already been digitized in the wider Balkan Region and are carefully preserved in film libraries and archives, all with the aim of creating a daring and festival atmosphere in which we will celebrate the film industry that many of us (filmmakers, authors of any kind, and the audience) recognizes it as an activity that is very significant, not only for the preservation of the audiovisual cultural heritage and identity of a country, but its funds and as a huge wealth with an inexhaustible creative potential that inspires the creation of new ideas and ever better creative documentaries - pointed out Petrula Veljanovska, program coordinator of "MakeDox".

This year's "Country in Focus" themed segment is focused on cinematographic archives from several countries. Films from the Central State Film Archive of Albania, the Croatian State Archive, the National Film Institute of Hungary, the Slovenian Cinematheque, the Archive of the Yugoslav Cinematheque, the Montenegrin Cinematheque, the Bulgarian National Film Archive, the Romanian National Film Archive and the Cinematheque of North Macedonia will be shown.

- The numerous film titles that we are bringing this year from all the movie theaters in the Balkans are proof that we have something to learn from, if we want to. And that only if we keep all that is written down and memorized, we will be able to read it again and interpret it and use it in new stories. The archives are here to open our eyes, to bring us the other side of the story, even the third, and to confront us with our own convictions. Without the archives, we will hardly be able to understand why the world is the way it is, or to question our place in it as social, political and romantic souls - said Darko Nabakov, executive director of the festival.

The film program of the 15th "MakeDox" is divided into five categories – Main Program, New Authors, Short Documentaries, Student Documentaries and the Program for Children and Youth. The festival will open on August 15 with the screening of the documentary films "How is the year measured?" by Jay Rosenblatt and "Celluloid Underground" by Iranian author Ehsan Koshbakht, and will close on August 22 with the Macedonian premiere of Tamara's "Journey on Foot" Kotevska. As part of the music segment "Night stories" on August 22, Duke Bojadzhiev, who is the author of the music for Tamara Kotevska's film, will hold a concert. 92 films will be shown at the festival, ten of which are by Macedonian authors. A hundred guests from abroad will be present at the festival.

Among the titles that will be shown at the festival are the new film by the notable filmmaker Viktor Kosakovski, which will be presented by "Architekton". The program also includes the winner of this year's Berlinale – the documentary film "Dahomey" by director Matti Diop. The film "Hollywoodgate" by director Ibrahim Nasha'at, edited by Atanas Georgiev, will be shown in the program "New Authors". The Macedonian premiere will be the film "Gradina" by Bojan Tanturovski, while the student program will show the film "Life on the Board" by the young author Leona Jaric. At the festival, three documentaries produced by the school for young filmmakers "Dokuniculci" will be premiered.

Five awards will be given at the festival, "Onion", "Young Onion", "Chopped Onion", "Kokarche" and the Award for Best Ethical Ideas, and 15 international professionals from the documentary world are members of the award committees. In addition to the selection for awards, on August 17 and 18, MCC will show Animated stories for children from 5 to 55 years old.

Two masterclasses will be held in the festival program. On August 17, a masterclass will be held in the "Laboratory" with the film director Stole Popov entitled "Back off, I'm running out of tape", which will be moderated by the filmologist Ilindenka Petrusheva. The second masterclass will take place on August 18 in the "Laboratory" entitled "Second-hand sounds and images" and will reveal the methods of film director Ineke Smits and radio content editor Jeroen Stout for the reuse of archive sounds and images.

As part of the thematic framework of the festival, a Workshop on archival practices in the film entitled "Imagining archives" will be held. The workshop will be held from August 15 to 19 at the "Fx3x" studio with the mentors Kumjana Novakova, a director whose authorship is based on research and also works as a film curator and lecturer, and Vlad Petri, a Romanian film director with a great interest in political and social issues. topics. The documentary film "The Silence of Reason" by Kumjana Novakova will be shown as part of the main program.

In the industrial segment of the festival, the sixth edition of the MakeCoProDox forum will be held, the main goal of which is the development of a strategic plan for increasing the co-production of documentary films between the Balkan countries. The forum gathers in one place representatives from regional film centers, professionals from the field of documentary film and from the film industry and 9 projects that are in different stages of production, selected through an open call.

This year's edition of MakeCoProDox Forum will be held from August 19 to 21 in Skopje. Moderators and mentors of the forum are Helle Hansen (documentary consultant, former film advocate for documentaries at the Norwegian and Danish Institute), Brigid O'Shea (co-founder of the Documentary Association of Europe), Zeynep Güzel (head of Doc Station in of the Berlinale Talent Program, senior consultant at the Documentary Society of Europe) and producer Victor Ede (Cinephage Productions) from France.

- This year we have significant cooperation with the French Institute and the French Embassy, ​​so we will have a panel between representatives of the Balkan film centers and producers from France, and the panel will discuss the co-production agreements between the Balkan countries and France. With an emphasis on documentary archives, the director of Doc Industry at the Doc Leipzig festival, Nadja Tenstedt, will present the work at a professional archive market. There will also be a presentation of "Dokumentarnica", which is a laboratory for the development of documentary films from Slovenia, which was created by the Slovenian Film Center and the Society of Directors from Slovenia - said Sarah Ferro, head of the industry program of "MakeDocs".

The complete program can be found on the official website of "MakeDox" (www.makedox.mk), and the festival application will also be available for download.

Partners of "MakeDox" are PPFP, MKC - Youth Cultural Center, Cinematheque of the Republic of North Macedonia and the festival network "Doc Around Europe".

The fifteenth edition of "MakeDox" is supported by the RSM Film Agency, the MEDIA Program of "Creative Europe", the National Foundation for Democracy from Washington, the RSM Ministry of Culture, the "Yunus Emre" Institute - Skopje, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Embassy of France, the French Institute, the Czech Embassy in Skopje, the Czech Cultural Center in Sofia, the Slovenian Embassy, ​​the Greek Film Center, the Goethe Institute, "Vardar Film", the Youth Cultural Center, the Museum of Macedonia, the Archaeological Museum, the Faculty of Fine Arts, taxis " Global", "Laboratory".

Media patrons of "MakeDox" are MTV - First Program Service, Sloboden Pechat, Nova Macedonia, Espresso.mk, MKD.mk, UMNO.mk, SDK.mk (I want to say.mk), Plus Info, Okno, Off.net .

(The text was published in "Cultural Press" number 242, in the printed edition of the newspaper "Sloboden Pechat" on 10-11.8.2024)