Global documentaries on show at CineDOC festival in Tbilisi

Dozens of documentaries from around the globe are being welcomed at the second annual CineDOC – an international documentary film festival being held in Tbilisi.

Cinedoc-Tbilisi established in 2013 as the first international documentary film festival in the Caucasus that focused on creative documentary. This year’s second annual event is being held from October 14-19 in cinemas in Georgia’s capital city. 

The six-day festival will present award winning films from outside of Georgia as well as local and regional productions. This year more than 50 documentaries will be presented.

This year nine creative documentary films, directed and produced in Canada, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Hungary and Georgia, will compete for the main award. 

Films will be screened in one of the event’ three sections: International Documentary Competition, Focus Caucasus and CineDOC Young. 

Three Georgian documentaries, The Ruler directed by Shalva Shengeli, Biblioteka (Library) directed by Anna Tsimintia and the Another City directed by writer Zurab Inashvili will feature in the festival.

The Festival opened by a film titled Do you believe in love? By Israeli filmmakers Dan Wasserman and Barak Heymann. Their film was about a matchmaker named Tova who was paralyzed because of muscular dystrophy and specialised in finding matches for people with disabilities. Her tough-love approach leads to a unique matchmaking style but her passion for the work and for her clients is undeniable.

Meanwhile at the festival guests have a chance to view a variety of documentary films with a unique directing vision, an original visual style, sympathetic protagonists and powerful stories. 

As well as the three main sectors, this year two new sections was added to the competition. The Section Ukrainian Voices did not aim to reflect the current situation in Ukraine but to provide snapshots into nowadays Ukraine. In this section four Ukrainian documentaries will be shown.

The other new section this year was Other Space. This section of the festival was dedicated to films that depicted other spaces - spaces that existed and spaces that only appear in a person’s imagination, spaces we run away from and spaces we will always return to. Four films from Germany, Sweden, Czech Republic and Belgium will participate in this section.

Throughout the festival each film screening will be followed by an open discussion and debates. The event will also include master classes with renowned film directors and open sessions with invited international guests.

Georgia’s Ministry of Culture, Georgian National Film Centre and Goethe Institute Tbilisi are supporting the international documentary film festival.