The 17th DocsBarcelona festival kicks off on May 28th. This year, both the festival and the Pitching Forum focus on individual activism, both social and political, showing films that reveal a world that will not sit down and keep quiet, but a world in transformation.
Amongst the world & national premieres showing are “Five Days to Dance” (Rafa Molés, Pepe Andreu) and “Demonstration” (Victor Kossakovsky & 32 students) as well as Polar Star Films’ “Parrot at the Milkbar”, a documentary film set in Barcelona’s Raval quarter, perhaps the neighbourhood to have suffered the most extensive and radical change in recent years.
“Parrot at the Milkbar”, by German director Ines Thomsen and showing in the Official Section on May 31st and June 1st, tells the story of four hairdressers in the Raval, all with customers from the same neighbourhood but of very different nationalities. Each hairdressers is a world apart, almost impenetrable to outsiders. A documentary that submerges itself in the daily life of people who left their home to find a better one, while the Spaniards are about to leave their own country themselves.
InterDocsBarcelona, a special session on interactive documentary held for the first time last year, is to be repeated this year with conferences and presentation to discuss new, narrative forms of interactive documentary. DocsBarcelona has two new sections this year: “DOC-U” focussed on university talent and audiovisual production, and “Sense Ficció” to celebrate 5 years of TV3’s commission slot Sense Ficció which recently screened Polar Star Films’ “Google and the World Brain”.
In the non-competition section, Special sessions at DocsBarcelona 2014, “La tragedia electrónica” is showing. This Catalan production for ARTE about the growing residue problem of electronic devices is directed by Cossima Dannoritzer, with whom Polar Star Films is currently developing a new project.