International Feature-Length Competition

Program Notes

The International Feature-Length Competition is a testament to the development and growth of documentaries from submissions across the world. This category presents documentaries that bring novelty to the language of cinema by telling stories with depth and complexity. These films, to us, can serve to build a discourse in documentary film, placing a perspective that defends its own ideas. The films in this category are packaged with creative storytelling and approaches that not only convey issues, but also use documentary as a medium for social reflection and intervention.

This year’s films have moved on from the heady days of the global pandemic, when face masks, isolation, and social distancing were common themes that emerged in each work. This year’s entries are strong and diverse in terms of style, subject matter, and regional distribution. This category showcases documentaries that remind us of the diversity of humanity and the common struggle for a meaningful, safe, and peaceful life.

We have selected 12 films that capture the breadth of human experience from China to Mexico, Armenia to Myanmar.

Jury

Sunah Kim

Sunah Kim is a Korean-American filmmaker, currently working in South Korea. She started her film career as a narrative film producer in New York City. Since moving back to Korea in 2013, she has produced several highly acclaimed documentary features such as Singing with Angry Bird, The Birth of Resonance, Coming to You Minu, as well as an IDA-award winning Netflix Original DocuSeries My Love: Six Stories of True Love. In 2022 and 2023, she served as the Head of Industry at DMZ Docs. She also serves as a co-director of Korean Documentary Network (KDN).

Wood Lin

Wood Lin is a filmmaker, film critic, writer, and festival organizer specializing in documentaries. He has also been invited as the juror for many international film festivals. He has served as program director of the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) since 2013 and has been the program advisor of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) since 2020. He currently supervises the division of research and program at the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute and is in charge of research, publication, film program, and TIDF.

Mella Jaarsma

Mella Jaarsma has become known for her complex costume installations and her focus on forms of cultural and racial diversity embedded within clothing, the body, and food. She was born in the Netherlands in 1960 and studied visual art at Minerva Academy in Groningen (1978-1984), after which she left the Netherlands to study at the Art Institute of Jakarta (1984) and at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta (1985-1986). She has lived and worked in Indonesia ever since. In 1988, she co-founded Cemeti Art House (with Nindityo Adipurnomo), the first space for contemporary art in Indonesia, which to this day remains an important platform for young artists and art workers in the country and region.

Selection Committee

Sandeep Ray

Sandeep Ray is a writer, filmmaker, and historian. He is the Head of the School of Media, Languages, and Cultures at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. He has published two books: Celluloid Colony explores ethnography in Dutch propagandistic film in colonial Indonesia and was a finalist for the EuroSEAS2022 Social Science Book Award, and A Flutter in the Colony which is a work of historical fiction set in Bengal and Malaya in the 1940s and 50s. Sandeep has made several nonfiction films that have been screened widely including at CPH:DOX, Busan, Sydney, Jihlava, and Tehran.

Umi Lestari

Umi Lestari is a writer, researcher and teacher, interested in researching marginalized figures and films in Indonesian film history. Together with Kelas Liarsip collective, Umi conducted a research and digitization program of Ratna Asmara’s films. In addition, Umi also published a book about film director and editor, Nawi Ismail, in 2023. Umi currently teaches at the Film Study Program, Multimedia Nusantara University.

Thomas Barker

Thomas Barker is currently an Honorary Associate Professor with the Humanities Research School at the Australian National University and a former head of school at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, where he taught for 9 years. He is the author of Indonesian Cinema after the New Order: Going Mainstream (2019) and has contributed to scholarship on screen industries in Southeast Asia and censorship in Malaysia. He is currently researching the history of Indonesian cinema from 1950 to 1966.