Dear Festivalgoers!
Now it’s May, traditionally the month of the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival. We’ve worked hard this year to prepare an event brimming with emotions and knowledge, featuring an excellent lineup allowing us to deepen our perception of reality. Thanks to your trust and openness to documentary cinema, last year’s hybrid edition brought 170 000 of us together, creating a true community in cinemas as well as online. We’re counting on it this year, too.
However, we had to make the difficult decision to reschedule the festival to September. The 18th—now grown-up—edition of Millennium Docs Against Gravity will take place in September 3-12 in cinemas in Warsaw, Wrocław, Gdynia, Poznań, Katowice, Lublin, and Bydgoszcz, with the online edition taking place between September 16 and October 3. We’re hoping you’ll stay with us; you have our promise that this year’s wonderful program which we so badly want to share with you will not suffer due to this delay. Everyone who bought a festival pass will be able to use it in September or receive a refund.
Thanks to all of you, Millennium Docs Against Gravity is a major event taking place simultaneously in seven cities and dozens of cinemas throughout the country. We’re collaborating with numerous organizations and media. Over 1300 screenings every year make us the largest film festival in Poland and one of the largest in the world with regard to cinema screenings. Given the situation and the scale of our event, we’re simply unable to reschedule the festival by several days or weeks with less than a month left—the whole operation would’ve been far too complex logistically to coordinate. Right up until the recent government conference a few days ago we’d been hearing that cinemas would reopen in early May; the information came from reliable sources and seemed very plausible. Much like other festivals and cultural institutions, we’d been counting on culture rapidly returning to normal, ushering in an intellectual thaw right after the third wave of the pandemic.
We were eager to be a part of this change and wanted to launch our festival immediately after the reopening of art-house cinemas in order to support them. We hoped to bring you world-class documentary cinema in the month normally associated with our festival. We were going full speed ahead to the launch of this year’s edition on May 21—and everything seemed to indicate that it would take place. The decision to reopen cinemas on May 29 came as a huge surprise and a painful shock; we appealed to the government for an earlier reopening, but sadly, that proved impossible.
You’ve already heard a lot about this year’s program, so you know it’s worth waiting for! This will be an awesome festival and we believe that, though rescheduled due to the pandemic, it will be a huge success.
Thank you once again for your trust and patience. See you in September!
Artur Liebhart and the entire team of Millennium Docs Against Gravity
