Documenta Madrid, the International Film Festival of the City Council of Madrid, presents the official image of its 18th edition, this time created by the Nordic artist duo Inka & Niclas Lindergård. It also presents the names of the National, International and Final Cut sections jury members. The festival, organised by Cineteca Madrid, a space of the Cultural Area of the City Council of Madrid, will take place from 26 to 30 May in its on-site version , with the award ceremony on May 30th, and from May 31st to June 6th in different outlets, and online through the VOD platform Filmin.

Inka & Niclas Lindergård, creators of the visual identity of the Festival

The visual identity of this year continues the renovation proposal of the past edition. The image series of the 18th edition of Documenta Madrid poster have been created by the artist duo Inka & Niclas Lindergård (Finland, 1985, and Sweden, 1984), whose work is based on materiality of photography, the contemporary perception processes of nature and the connection of the photographic medium with the stylisation of landscape. Their work is an open portal to the hyperrealistic synthesis of beauty, kitsch and visual desire in the language of photography. Their works have been exhibited in Paris Photo 2016 or Haute Photography 2019 in Rotterdam, among others, and have been awarded with the Swedish Photobook Price in 2017 and 2012.

This editions image presents natural landscapes photographs analogically coloured with light and filters used in pre-production. A possible colourist metaphor of how cinema expresses reality, always through the filter of author’s gaze and the context of the work itself.

National, International and Final Cut competitions present their jury

Documenta Madrid 2021 will have nine jury members from different countries in its National, International and Final Cut sections.

The National competitive section jury members will be Rebecca de Pas, Festival Visions du Réel programmer; Javier Fernández Vázquez, film director; and the critic and commissioner Elena Gorfinkel, based in the UK.

The International competitive section jury members will be Sofia Bohdanowicz, Polish-Canadian film director; Chema González, Cultural Activities Manager of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; and Zsuzsanna Kiràly, film producer of Flaneur Films in Germany. Last, Maria Bonsanti, Eurodoc network director, and Virginia García del Pino, film director and teacher, will be in charge of evaluating and supporting the selected projects in the Final Cut section, aimed to films in the final stage of Spanish production or co-production.

18th International Film Festival Documenta Madrid

Documenta Madrid, the el International Film Festival of Documentary Cinema supported by the City Council of Madrid with the collaboration of other cultural venues of the city and organised by Cineteca Madrid, a space of the Cultural Area of the City Council of Madrid, returns again to Madrid to promote the best cinema coming from all over the world, focusing on contemporary cinema and putting special interest in news aesthetic proposals, films inspired on the diverse non-fictional forms, and look into the audio-visual forms, no matter its definition, length, gender or category.

For the second year in a row, the artistic curatorship of the festival will be entrusted to two prestigious international programmers, under the direction of Cineteca Madrid: Cecilia Barrionuevo, artistic director of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, and James Lattimer, programmer of the Berlinale Forum.

The festival includes two competitive sections, International and National, each with its own award. The new feature introduced last year whereby feature films and short films competed for the prizes in each section on equal terms, is maintained and another new feature is added this year, the aforementioned transformation of the Fugas category into the Fugas Award for innovation and creative risk-taking. 

This year, the three sections together will give more than 36.000 euros in prizes for the films and the awarded projects. Both the International and the National Competitive Sections will award three prizes each: the Jury Award for Best Film, worth €10,000 for each section, the Fugas Award, worth €5,000 also for each section, and the Cineteca Madrid Audience Award, worth €1,000 for each section and awarded on the basis of votes cast by spectators both in person and online. For the first time, the films selected for the Final Cut will compete for a cash prize of €4,000.

In addition, the jury may award a special mention for each category - National Competition, International Competition and Final Cut - consisting of a diploma. And films in the National Competitive Section will also compete for the CineZeta Award, conferred by the young programmers of CineZeta, at Cineteca Madrid, which will also consist of a diploma.

A total of 792 films from 81 different nationalities have inscribed in the National and International competitive sections of this edition. Among those, 245 are Spanish productions or co-productions. The Final Cut section, aimed to films in the final stage of Spanish production or co-production, has received 53 inscriptions of projects in an advanced editing status.