“I love seeing projects that are coming up and this is a very rare opportunity for programmers to be able to give detailed advice and feedback on projects. Usually we just watch films, we don’t have a chance to talk to the filmmakers about what is working and what is not, so in that sense it is very unique,” says one of the former guests, Basil Tsiokos from Sundance, a festival that will be represented by Sudeep Sharma this year. Representatives of international festivals such as Mourad-Anis Moussa, a programmer of Visions du Réel, Amalie Brok from CPH:DOX, Heather Haynes representing Hot Docs and Elena Gaitanarou from Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival will also be looking for films for their competition sections at the workshop. The Czech festivals like IDFF Ji.hlava and One World will of course be present as well.
Together with sales agents from CAT&Docs and Lightdox, broadcasters from Al Jazeera and HBO Max and other experts, the programmers will share their knowledge of the current situation in the documentary industry, including distribution strategies that work in 2025 or topics connected to AI, during open sessions dedicated to new challenges of the market. For these sessions, dok.incubator will open to film professionals and offer a unique insight into the distribution and positioning of soon to be released documentaries. The attendees will have a chance to understand the festivals from the sales point of view which will guide them on how to plan an effective strategy for their films, and then from the programmers themselves who will share their festivals’ selection rules.
Additionally, all decision-makers will attend meetings with filmmakers from film teams selected for the international, Czech, and Slovak dok.incubator workshops, as well as guest films participating in dok.connect networking events. The recent addition to dok.incubator activities also includes a co-production forum, which represents a unique networking opportunity for European producers. This event will bring together 20 producers, post-production houses and funds to find possible interesting partnerships and future collaborations.
dok.incubator is a think-tank founded in 2010 by experienced training providers to help documentary filmmaking survive the current media crisis. It is an eight-month long rough-cut workshop for 8 international and 8 Czech and Slovak creative teams (director, editor, producer) with ambitions to enter the international market with their films. The tutors lead the workshop participants to conclude the strongest possible dramaturgy of their final cut and to reach a wide international audience by building a clever distribution strategy using new digital technologies and smart online marketing tools. This concept has helped 14 films from dok.incubator to be selected for Sundance competition and more than thirty of them to succeeded at IDFA, CPH:DOX or Hot Docs.
