Nobel Peace Prize winner journalist Dmitry Muratov is visiting Riga

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The documentary film symposium organized by the festival on March 8 will also feature a conversation between the philosopher Uldis Tirons and Dmitry Muratov.

According to the festival’s organizers, Dmitry Muratov’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper deals with high-level investigative journalism in Russia, including investigating human rights abuses by the Kadyrov regime in Chechnya, the destruction of the MH17 Malaysian flight and the organized migration crisis at Belarus’s borders. “Investigative journalism takes courage, because the topics studied by journalists reflect injustice and sometimes organized crime. Unfortunately, this courage is accompanied by the threat of death and the murder of six newspaper journalists, including the prominent pacifist Anna Politkovskaya, during the Muratov editorial,” the festival said.

In Riga, Dmitry Muratov will take part in the Artdocfest jury of the Artdocfest / Riga International Documentary Film Festival, with Tiina Lokk, director of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, and a Russian writer, literary critic, radio and Simone Baumann, director of the German film promotion platform German Peter, Peter Gottschalk, editor of the French television channel ARTE, and director Jerzy Sladkowski).

In addition to an extensive film program, a documentary film symposium will take place within the festival. In it, filmmakers and theorists will discuss both the films included in the festival program and the latest trends and artistic solutions in documentary filmmaking. Discussions within the symposium will be available to the film industry and the general public.

One of the events of the symposium will be a conversation between the philosopher Uldis Tirons and the journalist and member of the festival jury Dmitry Muratov. In the discussion “Cold War – on our edge, in the everyday life of our neighbors”, filmmakers, politicians and public figures will discuss the tense geopolitical situation and the possible or impossible role of documentary in it. In the talk “New Ethics and Documentary Cinema”, directors, producers and film theorists will look at the role of documentary cinema in a context of polarizing society, with censorship and self-censorship, political correctness, and the impact of political and financial instruments on film content. In the discussion of the “Commission of the Future”, young and upcoming directors, actors, philosophers and critics will express their predictions about the future – how the world and cinema will develop in the next ten years and about their role in this process. More information about the symposium is available on the festival website.

From March 3 to 8, there will be an opportunity to enjoy 28 documentaries from 14 countries in the festival’s two competition programs “Baltic Focus” and “Artdocfest”, as well as in the out-of-competition program.
The full festival program and more detailed information can be found Homepage.

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