Conference on Ethics in Documentary Filmmaking – we deliberate film as not only an image, but as a relationship.

The Conference on Ethics in Documentary Filmmaking is an open platform that brings together academics, professionals, and creatives from across various fields, as well as the general public. The Conference's goal is to spark dialogue on key ethical issues in documentary filmmaking and to create space for domestic research that bridges practice and theory. It opens discussions on the relationships between the filmmaker, protagonist, audience, and film, and formulates a set of questions within film practice that it seeks to answer through interactive dialogue. At its core, lies a fundamental and crucial question: what does ethics mean in documentary film?

Ethics in documentary film is not a marginal topic - it is the core of responsible creation. The conference provides a space for sharing experiences, doubts, and questions that accompany working with reality, people, and images. Filmmakers, academics, and the public meet here to reflect together on what it means to be a fair, sensitive, and conscious documentary filmmaker in today’s world. Film is, therefore, not just built on an image – it is built on relationships.

Ethical Dilemmas in Documentary Practice
We open a discussion on the responsibility of filmmakers, their relationships with protagonists, and the boundaries between art and intervention in reality.

Connecting Perspectives
We bring together academics, filmmakers, producers, and the public to encourage collective reflection on ethics in film.

Creating Space for Research and Exchange
We foster systematic reflection on ethics in the Central European context and explore new forms of collaboration between theory and practice.

2025 – Creative Control and Authorship in the Age of AI

The fifth edition of the conference is dedicated to AI and its role in the creative process. We will explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the concepts of authorship, control, and responsibility in filmmaking. Can we think of AI as a tool, or as a co-creator? And how does its presence influence the ethics, trust, and authenticity of documentary film? Together, we will examine the relationship between the human–as–author and technology- as a tool or collaborator. We will also focus on practical strategies for filmmakers, including how to maintain human responsibility at the center of creation, label AI-generated content transparently, and utilise open-source tools in film production.

Visitors can look forward to an academic panel where experts will offer a theoretical perspective on authorship, control, and AI use in documentary filmmaking. The keynote will be given by director and scholar Dominic Lees, who will focus on questions of how documentary dramaturgy is changing through the emergence of AI. Students can sign up for a morning coffee session and join a discussion on ethical dilemmas, authorship, representation, and audience trust. Who truly decides what a film will look like today? Who holds the camera? These questions will also be part of the panel discussion.

A detailed program will be published in the coming days.

2024 – Responsibility for the Subject Matter

The third edition focused on the processes involved in deciding on documentary film topics — whether at the individual level of filmmakers, in the institutional environment of production companies and media, or in relation to political and economic power. The conference opened up the question of responsibility for selecting, shaping, and promoting topics that contribute to our shared, public reflection on a world of crises, uncertainty, and risk.

2023 – The Documentary of Our Time: Making the Absent Present

The second edition of the conference focused on discussing the use of materials that filmmakers did not shoot themselves, such as archival footage, found footage, home videos, and more. The aim was to explore the boundaries, principles, and documentary methods of working with such materials, particularly in the context of historical and current crises, such as wars, totalitarian regimes, propaganda, or the pandemic.

2022 – Power and Power Relations in Documentary Film

This edition centered on topics related to power in the context of documentary filmmaking, including the boundaries of authorship and responsibility towards others, power relations between different professions within the film industry, the influence of institutions on film content and production, filmmakers’ responsibilities towards the people they work with, and personal relationships in the professional environment.