The DocsBarcelona festival will celebrate its 25th edition from next Wednesday, May 18 to 29, at its usual venues: the Aribau cinemas, the CCCB, the Filmoteca de Catalunya, and the Filmin virtual window, and thus returns to face-to-face after two years of pandemic. The exhibition will offer a selection of the world production of documentaries with twenty-nine feature films, twelve short films and four more titles in the Docs section
The festival will open this Wednesday with the North American production Navalny , by Daniel Roher. Winner of the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, this spy thriller portrays the figure of Alexei Navalny, one of the most relevant opponents of Vladimir Putin, today sentenced to nine years in prison, and focuses on the poisoning he suffered in a plane ride from Siberia to Moscow, in his subsequent recovery and in the fight to find out who was behind his assassination attempt.
Another session will be even more topical. This is the latest work by Laura Poitras, Oscar winner with Citizen Four (2014), a short film entitled Terror Contagion that exposes the activities of the Israeli company NSO Group, creator of Pegasus spyware, recently used to infect the phones of people related to with independence.
DocsBarcelona is presenting six Catalan feature films to the competition, such as Robin Bank , directed by Anna Giralt Gris, a thriller about the Catalan activist Enric Duran, and his fraud against forty banking entities to distribute the profits among social projects. Duran is still searching and capturing and will present the documentary virtually.
In the official Panorama section, you can see Estimada Sara , directed by Patrícia Franquesa. A film about the activism of women in Afghanistan who fight for their rights based on the figure of Sara, the first taxi driver in the country before the return of the Taliban.
Four more Catalan productions take part in the Latitude section: Tolyatti Adrift, in which Laura Sisteró travels to the city of Tolyatti, which in the past symbolized socialist pride for its powerful automobile industry and is now a place without a future; La cuina dels homes, where Sílvia Subirós builds a story of the history of cooking and the anonymity of women; El vent que es mou, by Pere Puigbert, a call to take care of the environment of l'Empordà and that focuses on wind energy; and Erasmus in Gaza , by Chiara Avesani and Matteo Delbò, the journey of an Italian medical student who leaves for Erasmus in Gaza.
Other films in competition will be Fire of love , by the Canadian Sara Dosa, about a couple of French geologists, Katia and Maurice Krafft, who documented volcanoes for more than 20 years; Dreaming Walls, a tour of New York's Chelsea Hotel produced by Martin Scorsese, and Nelly and Nadine, a love story between two women who fell in love in 1944 in a concentration camp.
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