The 19th edition of Camden Intl. Camden, which begins on September 14, will feature a handful of award-winning documentaries at festivals in Toronto, Sundance, South by Southwest, Berlin and Tribeca. The Maine Film Festival will take place in a hybrid format, with in-person events over four days concluding on September 17, and online screenings available from September 18-25 to audiences across the US.
Among the highlights of this year’s CIFF are the US premiere of Oscar-winning Alex Gibney’s “In Restless Dreams: The Music Of Paul Simon,” a documentary about the composer; Oscar nominee Raoul Peck’s “Silver Dollar Road,” a documentary about a black family’s decades-long fight against corrupt real estate developers to keep the North Carolina waterfront land they have rightfully owned for generations; Errol Morris’s The Pigeon Tunnel, a witty interview with spy novelist John le Carré; and Oscar-nominated Karim Amer’s Defiant, about Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and more. Key administration figures fighting to save their country from Russian invasion Each of the four documentaries will have its world premiere before CIFF, at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival.
CIFF will also present a preview of “The Mission,” by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, about American missionary John Chau, killed by arrows while trying to make contact with one of the world’s most isolated indigenous peoples. In addition, the Maine festival will screen “Eastern Front,” an immersive portrait of the front lines of the war between Ukraine and Russia, by exiled author and director Vitaly Mansky. The documentary premiered in February at the Berlin International Film Festival.
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Beyond Utopia, by Madeleine Gavin, which premiered in January at the Sundance Festival, will open the CIFF. The film, about a high-stakes journey of families trying to escape North Korea, won the Sundance People’s Choice Award: American Documentary.
Milisuthando by Milisuthando Bongela, another favorite of Sundance 2023 films, will also be screening at CIFF, along with Dawn Porter’s The Lady Bird Diaries, which debuted at SXSW.
In total, the 19th edition of the CIFFF, which in recent years has become one of the hot spots of the Oscar campaign, will feature 33 feature films and 27 short films from 28 different countries. 50% of the entire program is directed or co-directed by BIPOC filmmakers; This is the seventh consecutive edition in which the festival has reached gender parity within the programme.
“As the development and distribution of independent documentary films becomes increasingly difficult, we believe this program is a reminder of the incredible value of documentary film as a uniquely powerful art form and its extraordinary ability to resonate with audiences” , says Ben Fowlie, executive and artistic director of the Points North Institute, and founder of Camden Intl. Through 60 different cinematic experiences, we explore the beautiful relationship between content and form, examining the power of the image, engaging with the potential of the archive and immersing ourselves in the personal stories that help us reflect, reimagine and relate to each other. Cinema is a beacon, and we are grateful to the filmmakers who have made these works and shared these stories.”
“El Castillo” by Martín Benchimol, “Orlando” by Paul B. Orlando, my political biography”, by Paul B. Precadio, “Between revolutions”, by Vlad Petri, “A golden life”, by Boubacar Sangaré, and “Frente oriental”, by Mansky, are some of the five docus of the Berlin Intl. Festival that will be screened at the CIF. Berlin Film Festival that will be screened at the CIFF.
As in previous years, the festival will run concurrently with the Points North Artist Programs. CIFF’s feature film program will include four alumni of the Points North Artist Programs, all of whom are supported by the Points North Fellowship, the organization’s oldest development program. The four docuses are: Sierra Urich’s Joonam, which premiered at Sundance, Jude Chehab’s “Q,” which premiered in Tribeca and won the Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director, Pedro’s “Rejeito” by Filippis.de Pedro de Filippis, “Rejeito”, which premiered at the Cinéma du Réel in Paris, and “Time Bomb Y2K”, by Brian Becker and Marley McDonald, which will premiere on HBO at the end of the year.
The CIFF Filmmakers Solidarity Fund, created in 2020, will provide fees of approximately $300 to all feature film and short film crews participating in the virtual festival. Over four years, the fund will have distributed nearly $70,000 to CIFF participating filmmakers.
