With the attendance of more than 2,000 people and with more than 60 national and international participants, last weekend the fifth edition of MajorDocs, a documentary and creative film festival that has been held in Mallorca since 2018, closed.
The festival's main focus is on a new festival model in which slowness and reflection mark the way of watching films and talking about the creative process. Without counterprogramming, with an official section limited to eight films of which different screening sessions are offered and with a complete professional program that includes the participation of directors, editors, screenwriters but also thinkers and philosophers such as Ramón Andrés, MajorDocs achieves, year After year, focus on other ways of creating, always with the fight against time as the main axis.
In the words of filmmaker Miguel Eek, artistic director of the festival, “it is one of the paradoxes of our time: constant movement, flight as refuge. Our proposal is aimed at making reality and cinema mediate between the other and us.” More than 60 national and international participants have been able to discover the film potential of Mallorca thanks to the fifth edition of MajorDocs, a festival that highlights that potential from multiple perspectives.
And the slow philosophy that interweaves the approaches of MajorDocs connects directly with the definition of Mallorca as an “island of calm”: a place where the climate and spaces accompany reflection and meditation. The location of the professional conferences in a new headquarters, the Estudi General Lul·lià, has allowed us to take another step along this line, placing a hundred professionals in a unique environment, an old university center with more than five centuries of history .
The festival featured the screening of eight films from countries such as Argentina, Canada and Burkina Faso. The documentary that won the jury prize, “Al Djanat”, directed by filmmaker Chloé Aïcha Boro, comes from this last country. It is a cash prize of 1,500 euros.
In addition, the jury, chaired by Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi, wanted to give a special mention to the feature film “The Dependents”, directed by Sofia Brockenshire. For its part, the audience award went to the film “Apolonia, Apolonia” by Danish director Lea Glob. On the other hand, MajorDocs is committed to creating a space for exchange between different professionals in the sector and organizes a Pitch session in which five projects are chosen and presented in different phases of development.
The award for best Pitch went to the project “The Tree of the Broken Shadow”, by Nicolás Baksht. The prize consists of 1,500 euros in cash in addition to advice from DAE, the European documentary association. In its commitment to a new way of approaching the festival concept, MajorDocs also includes a program aimed at the educational sector, with a series of screenings in which 864 students from 12 educational centers participated in this fifth edition.
All in all, at MajorDocs the objective is to create a firm and lasting link between different audiences and documentary cinema and to do so through reflection and slowness.
