Still: Becoming Bird - Jan van IJken

Short Joy

Jan van IJken’s Becoming Bird has been selected for the Short Joy competition. Celebrating its world premiere at Ji.hlava, the short film offers a close look at the miraculous embryonic development of a chicken inside its egg. Later this year, the film will also be presented at IDFA in the Signed section.

Fascinations

In the Fascinations competition, Echoes Between Seeing#2 will have its international premiere. Directed and produced by Nan Wang, the film combines analog noise textures, 16mm film grain, travel fragments, and AI-driven synthesis to explore how perception stitches together fragments of experience. The film premiered at IFFR in February.

Also selected for Fascinations is Michiel van Bakel’s Panorama Chemours - River Reflections*, produced by Zinc Garden. The film will have its international premiere at Ji.hlava. A controversial riverscape is reflected in otherworldly hues and underwater sounds. It also previously premiered at IFFR in February.

Opus Bonum and Czech Joy

Return to a Strange Land, directed by Olga Malířová Špátová and co-produced in the Netherlands by Kylian Productions, has been selected for both the Opus Bonum and Czech Joy competitions. The Czech-Dutch co-production will have its European premiere at Ji.hlava and will open this year’s festival. In this nostalgic and yet dramatic work, choreographer Jiří Kylián addresses a multitude of themes concerning our very existence as well as the passing of time and our final moments.

Other Dutch Co-Productions

Madelon Hooykaas’s Ecology of the Body, a co-production between the Netherlands, France and Italy, has been selected for Ji.hlava, where it will have its international premiere. A poetic topography of the body unfolds, exploring its layered and reciprocal relationship with the environment.

Murmurs in the Distance, directed by Katayoon Barzegar, Behshad Tajammol and Pegah Pasalar, is another international co-production featuring the Netherlands, alongside Germany, France, the United States and Iran. The film will have its world premiere at the festival. On 8 March 1979, protests by Iranian women against the suppression of their rights by the religious regime reached a climax on the streets of Tehran.

Sophie Fiennes’s The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias**, a co-production between Ireland, the United Kingdom, Slovenia, the Netherlands and Norway, will also be presented. Produced in the Netherlands by The Film Kitchen, the feature documentary explores freedom in dark times, as Fiennes inserts philosopher Žižek into movies, locations and virtual worlds, blending insight and entertainment within a visually inventive and enduringly relevant film.

Read more about the 30th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival here.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Production Incentive