DocsBarcelona 2020

Titles such as Vivos, by the Chinese artist, activist, and dissident Ai Weiwei, stand out. After focusing on the issue of migration in Human Flow (2017) and The Rest (2019), the filmmaker now travels to Mexico to report systemic corruption in institutions by focusing on the disappearance of some forty students who one September morning in 2014, while travelling to Mexico City to commemorate the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, were attacked by police.

Renowned for her original and poignant look at the subjects she deals with in her films, the Czech filmmaker Helena Třeštíková is the co-creator of Forman vs. Forman along with Jakub Hejna. A documentary about the figure of the Oscar-winning director of Amadeus and Someone flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which is also a look at communism, the American Dream and the Czech independence process. Also a portrait of an artist is the first feature film (and film testament) of the recently deceased producer Artemio Benki: Solo accompanies the composer and pianist Martín Perino, witness of the struggle between his own genius and the effects of the mental illness he was diagnosed with .

Another centrepiece of the festival is Winter Journey, by Danish filmmaker Anders Østergaard. A hybrid, a fiction disguised as a documentary or vice versa, which reveals the existence of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, or Jewish Cultural League with which in the early 1930s Goebbels' Nazi Ministry of Propaganda allowed Jewish artists to perform for Jewish audiences.

The Panorama section will also feature films such as Overseas, where Korean filmmaker Sung A-Yoon talks about the fate of Filipino migrants who go into exile in the first world to earn a living as nannies or domestic workers, previously attending a kind of school of modern slavery, which makes them almost national heroines in the eyes of their country’s government. Or titles like Hi, AI by German filmmaker Isa Willinger, which talks about the development of robots and artificial intelligence without ignoring the ethical conflicts related to them, from an unusual perspective filled with a sense of humour.

With 55 percent of the program being by female directors, this year's edition of DocsBarcelona is especially sensitive with issues that put women in the foreground. Titles as powerful as That Which Does Not Kill, by AlexPoukine, one of the jewels in the What the Doc! section which opens a window to the most innovative and risky approach to documentary. The film deals with the subject of rape from a perspective as original as it is rigorous, as subtle as it is devastating.

Check out the programme.