As any fan of Shakespeare – or of romance – can tell you, Romeo & Juliet takes places in Verona, Italy. Turns out the lovelorn everywhere are well aware of the play’s setting.
For over 50 years, “people from around the world have sent their heartaches, hopes, and confessions” to the city in Italy’s northern Veneto region. The Juliet Club in Verona has become the repository for these heartfelt letters – 200,000 of them.
This is the background for a documentary in development called Love Letters, which intends to explore the archived missives “and the real lives of young people writing new ones. What happens when we revisit senders from decades ago? Do they still remember their letters? Are they still in love? As we follow students through their daily lives, and volunteers answering the latest letters, we look for echoes of the past in the present. Has love changed—or have only the ways we talk about it shifted?”
The film directed by Paweł Ziemilksi is among 10 projects taking part in the Progress Pitching section of MDAG Industry, part of the world-class Millennium Docs Against Gravity festival underway in Warsaw and six other Polish cities. We’re right in the middle of the four-day Industry program, which runs through Monday.
MDAG Industry was launched four years ago to offer Polish documentary makers access to sales agents, producers, distributors and international festival representatives. It’s been growing steadily ever since.
“2021 was just a single curated event that we treated as a pilot,” Anna Szczypińska, head of Industry, tells Deadline. “And then each year we started adding pitching forums — both feature length and 10 short documentaries – and pitching of films for young audiences. We started inviting not only Polish projects, but also Eastern European projects.”
The Documentary Film Forum for Young Audiences, created six years ago, before MDAG Industry formerly began, aims at addressing a conundrum for the doc field – how to get young people interested in nonfiction cinema.
“We believe that it’s important to promote documentaries for kids,” Szczypińska notes. “They are our future and documentary documentaries are an amazing tool for education.”
The projects in the forum appear well-suited to engage young viewers. Among them:
- Zoopolis, directed by Stanisław Tarnowski, “follows the rhythm of a single day in the life of Warsaw’s urban wildlife,” including a moose on the loose. “Zoopolis won’t just tell a story – it’ll be an experience.”
- Spiky Stories, directed by Maciej Gryzełko, unfolds from the perspective of a small hedgehog that finds refuge in a wildlife rehabilitation center. “The camera almost always stays low, close to the floor or table, as if we observe through the hedgehog’s eyes.”
- Goodbye Dolls, directed by Magda Wichrowska, examines “A day of life of two teenage girls who are dealing with adolescence very differently. The changes taking place in them are observed by their abandoned childhood dolls which have just come out of the closet.”
- In the documentary series Generation: Nika, directed by Vojtěch Hönig, Ukrainian teenagers from Kharkiv and Kherson “tell their own stories – with their own eyes, their own cameras, and their own voice.”
New to MDAG Industry this year is Xtended Pitch – showcasing four XR, AR, and VR projects “at various stages of production.” The selected projects, prepared for presentation by experienced tutors, “blur genre boundaries and explore new forms of storytelling.”
“The submission was opened worldwide, so it didn’t have to be Eastern European projects,” Szczypińska comments. “So, we have a project from Ireland, we have Polish projects. We decided on having that part of industry added because we are watching those trends and especially immersive formats, they are shaping new ways of telling stories. When we see this happening, we want to make sure the Polish audience and Polish industry and creators are also part of the conversation.”
Pole Position (pun intended) is a section that gives completed Polish documentaries a platform to shine in front of the festival’s international attendees.
“Because [international] guests are coming for MDAG Industry, they don’t have time to go to the festival screenings. And we want to promote Polish films from our program. The short way to [do that] is to showcase all of the Polish films that are in the program,” Szczypińska says, explaining that filmmakers have seven minutes each to make their presentations. “They can add something to the description [in the festival program], to the trailer, and then they have one-on-one meetings, and they can encourage other programmers or sales agents, distributors to either see a screener of the film or to invite them to the festival.”
MDAG Industry has also programmed two master classes – or perhaps it’s more accurate to say one master class and one “anti-master class.” The anti-master class will be conducted by British documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins.
“If you’ve met Mark Cousins, you know how charismatic and how brilliant a mind he is,” Szczypińska observes. “And the plan for the master class is really interesting and I am curious myself to see why it’s called ‘Anti-Master Class.’ It won’t be anything you expect… He’s an amazing director and the way he tells the stories and creates the narration is unique.”
Cousins’ class takes place today (Saturday) at MDAG. On Sunday, noted sound designers Nicolas Becker (Oscar winner for Sound of Metal, whose credits also include Gravity and Arrival) and Peter Albrechtsen (Evil Dead Rise, and documentaries The Cave and The Territory) lead a master class titled Creating Immersive Audio in Documentary. They will take audiences through their work on director Oliver Sarbil’s Viktor, an exploration of a Deaf Ukrainian man’s attempt to serve in his country’s armed forces defending Ukraine against the full-scale Russian invasion.
“The immersive part of the audio in Viktor is really captivating. It will kind of be a case study, some behind-the-scenes insights and the master class will be held in Frédéric Chopin University of Music,” Szczypińska notes. “The master class will be in a room with Dolby Atmos, so we can experience that part of their work in its full potential.”
MDAG Industry will present awards in nine categories, some with cash prizes and others with awards that come in the form of filmmaker services or travel grants. The winner of the newly added Visioni dal Mondo Award, for instance, will get the chance to attend the Visioni dal Mondo documentary festival in Milan, Italy. “They will have an opportunity to go to another market and to pitch their project to a new audience and totally different part of industry,” says Szczypińska.
MDAG Industry has become a key draw for documentary professionals around the world who are coming to Millennium Docs Against Gravity in increasing numbers.
“I’m very excited because we are growing and we can see that in the guest list and in the program,” Szczypińska tells Deadline. “It’s very exciting that each year we have more and more foreign guests coming to the festival and we don’t have to persuade them to come. We have a lot of new things this year, so each year it’s like creating a new festival. We are changing a lot each year.”
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