Some of the biggest names in nonfiction film are heading to Poland for the 22nd edition of Millennium Docs Against Gravity, one of the largest docu
Some of the biggest names in nonfiction film are heading to Poland for the 22nd edition of Millennium Docs Against Gravity, one of the largest documentary festivals in the world.
The event running from this Friday until May 18 (and online from May 20-June 2) will welcome Oscar winners Asif Kapadia and Alex Gibney, Oscar nominees David France, Rémi Grellety, and Guy Davidi, and fellow award-winning filmmakers Lauren Greenfield, Mark Cousins, Andres Veiel, Alexis Bloom, Chester Algernal Gordon, Mads Brügger, Zackary Drucker, Brandon Kramer, Rachel Elizabeth Seed, among many others.
The festival, which runs simultaneously in seven cities including Warsaw, Łódź, and Gdynia, will showcase almost 180 films from around the world, a number of which are very likely to wind up in the next Oscar race.
“I think it’s going to be amazing,” says artistic director Karol Piekarczyk. “These films are absolutely incredible, and I can’t wait for people to see them. I do like to wander around the corridors of cinemas during our festival just to hear people talking about film, people who just stop me to talk about certain titles. And I think it’s just incredible that documentary cinema can be so popular and can achieve something like that.”
In the 2025 lineup are world premieres, as well as the international premiere of Baby Doe in Main Competition – a film about a woman who was charged with murder 20 years after she abandoned a newborn in the woods — and the European premieres of Come See Me in the Good Light and Life After.
A Millennium Docs Against Gravity audience
Millennium Docs Against Gravity
“We have Academy qualifying status [for Best Documentary Feature] now, so we do get world premieres and European premieres because people have seen what we’ve been up to,” Piekarczyk notes. “Last year, we had the international premiere of Sugarcane straight after Sundance, before it went to other festivals and before it got the Oscar nomination. We had the European premiere of [eventual Oscar nominee] Porcelain War.”
Those badges of honor notwithstanding, Piekarczyk emphasizes MDAG doesn’t get hung up on premiere status.
“It’s always the quality that comes first,” he says. “I would hate for our audience to not be able to see some films just because we decided that it’s only going to be world premieres.”
The theme of this year’s festival is “The Whole World Between Us,” a tagline that’s open to multiple meanings, suggesting a gulf that separates people or quite the opposite — what we share as members of society.
“It could be interpreted that there’s a lot that divides us, that there’s a whole world between us in terms of the stories which are often from all over the world,” Piekarczyk observes. “But then again, we focus on the intimacy of this quote – ‘between us’– and we think about it as something that’s happening between us [as programmers] and the filmmakers, but mainly it’s something that happens between us, as in the audience, and filmmakers.”
A Millennium Docs Against Gravity venue
Millennium Docs Against Gravity
He adds, “One of our top priorities is to create… the community of people who really, really care about what they watch and want to discuss it, whether it’s in the cinema hall after the screening or whether it’s just on the steps of the cinema. So, the feeling of community is really vital to us.”
Audiences will have much to digest and debate. The slate is organized into multiple categories, some of them perennial, like Climate for Action, Intimate Stories, and We Can Be Heroes.
“These are sections that we know we’re always going to get films for them. So, we’re not worried we might not fill them. They’re always there and people sort of know what to expect,” says Piekarczyk. “Intimate Stories are very much looking at the life of protagonists and they’re very psychological; they talk about human relationships. But then every year we also have special sections that are sort of one-off sections, and they basically depend on what we [decide on] towards the closing of the program.”
Mikal in ‘Flophouse America’
Photo by Monica Strømdahl
The “one-off” sections this year include Contrasting America, uniting work that explores the U.S. at a critical moment in its evolution. Among the films and series in that category are Lauren Greenfield’s Emmy-contending documentary series Social Studies, which explores how American teenagers are being impacted by intense social media engagement, and Flophouse America, a revealing look at a family living in a Florida “flophouse,” the kind of low-rent establishment where many on the lower economic rungs take up residence.
‘Free Leonard Peltier’
Public Square Films
Contrasting America, the artistic director notes, “was built on the kind of films we got that show a very complex picture of America like Free Leonard Peltier by David France and Jesse Short Bull, which is both about an intimate fight of the main protagonist, but it also is the story of decades of [injustice endured by] Indigenous peoples in America.”
MDAG awards 20 prizes across 16 competitions. The Main Competition features a dozen films, among them: 2000 Meters to Andriivka directed by Oscar winner Mstyslav Chernov; Myrid Carten’s A Want in Her; Apocalypse in the Tropics, directed by Oscar nominee Petra Costa; Coexistence, My Ass! from directed Amber Fares; Ryan White’s Come See Me in the Good Light, recently acquired by Apple TV+, and Trains, directed by Maciej Drygas, winner of the top prize for documentary at IDFA.
Main Competition will be judged by a distinguished jury: Salma Abdalla, international relations and PR manager at the Austrian Film Institute, and former CEO of Autlook Filmsales; Rémi Grellety, the two-time Oscar-nominated producer of I Am Not Your Negro and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat; and Simon Lereng Wilmont, the Oscar-nominated director of A House Made of Splinters.
MDAG features a Polish competition with numerous premieres in the running. The festival also hosts an Industry program which runs May 8-12, offering “a true backstage pass to the documentary world, crafted in response to the current needs of the audiovisual market, following trends, anticipating changes, and embracing innovation.” (Deadline will be posting a separate interview with Anna Szczypińska, head of the Industry program).
MDAG Artistic Director Karol Piekarczyk
Millennium Docs Against Gravity
Holding a festival simultaneously in seven cities presents considerable challenges, but it also allows MDAG to do “one huge sort of media blast” across Poland, “so the audiences really get to know about the festival,” says Piekarczyk. “You don’t have this feeling of, ‘Oh, there’s something happening in Warsaw and I can’t see it. It’s always only in Warsaw.’”
That geographic span and marketing reach helped pull in 165,000 attendees to MDAG screenings last year, an impressive number by any festival’s standards. Some of MDAG’s special guests this year will appear in more than one host city, something that wouldn’t be practical if the festival staggered locations throughout the calendar year.
“David France is coming and he’s not only going to be in Warsaw, he’s going to travel to another city,” notes Piekarczyk. “Mark Cousins is coming, but he’s going to also visit some other cities, and it would be impossible if we were doing a [staggered] edition.”
The caliber of films and the stature of MDAG filmmakers make for an stimulating event with international scope.
“A lot of filmmakers are coming for the second or third time just to experience the atmosphere,” Piekarczyk tells Deadline. “And also they’re not separated from the audience. Everybody is a part of this event and there’s this real community feel to it. And I think it’s incredible.”
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