24th Ji.hlava IDFF will be launched on Tuesday by a New Shift

24th Ji.hlava IDFF kicks-off in five days – this year happening online! The programme will offer over 270 films, Q&As, Inspiration Forum discussions and a programme for children. The festival will open with A New Shift by Jindřich Andrš, features tributes to Roberto Minervini and Karel Vachek and the audience will be treated to a preview of a documentary about Milan Kundera.

“Even though we are going online, we want to bring Ji.hlava’s unique atmosphere to our audience who will be able to join discussions with filmmakers as well as during the Inspiration Forum,” says festival director Marek Hovorka. “To keep Ji.hlava rolling, we will be streaming live from our Lighthouse studio on the Jihlava’s main square. From morning till night, we will bring information about the current events: interesting films and discussions, and the filmmakers themselves will be talking about their work,” continues Marek Hovorka. The live service will include both the discussion platform Inspiration Forum and the programme Ji.hlava for Kids. “The film world found itself in an unprecedented situation. Most of the festivals were cancelled or truncated while some fully adapted to the online environment. This is also case of the 24th edition of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival and it is clear that this will require many changes and a different approach from past editions. The current and future development will show how we all are able to join forces and keep the Czech film industry alive. And not only alive but also competitive in the upcoming years,” says Helena Bezděk Fraňková, director of the Czech Film Fund, the partner of the Lighthouse.

This year’s exceptional edition will open with a world premiere of a film by Jindřich Andrš called A New Shift. “The director follows up on his previous film The Last Shift of Thomas Hisem, screened at Ji.hlava two years ago,” says Hovorka. The time-lapse documentary A New Shift follows the main protagonist who has lost his job and retrains as a programmer. “The film was shot over the course of almost four years. We started shooting intensively in 2017, just before the closure of the Paskov coal mine. This was the initiation moment of our story: Thomas’s mine where he had worked his whole life closed down and he had to decide what to do next,” says the director about his film. “Thomas made an impression on me immediately at the programming course because he was very straightforward like a typical miner, and charismatic,” he adds. A New Shift will be released in cinemas after the festival.