For 10 American docu teams, this year’s Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival will be opening new doors for collaboration and support that are completely unknown to most indie filmmakers in the West.

The New Visions Forum: U.S. Docs section, building on a successful launch last year, is a financing, co-production and networking event dedicated to “supporting documentary production in its diversity and creativity.”

It features U.S. projects in development as well as in production and post-production, with selected projects spanning diverse genres and audiovisual formats – from fiction films with documentary aspects, to hybrid, “cinema expanded,” experimental and short films. The platform connects American filmmakers with the potential co-producers, distributors, sales representatives and film festivals from Europe.

Each project is pitched and presented by a director-producer pair, who screen a preview of the upcoming film at Ji.hlava on Oct. 27.

The U.S. projects feature a diversity of approaches and subjects, such as Amy Nicholson’s “Happy Campers,” set in a run-down campground off the coast of Virginia, where developers threaten the respite of tenants who live spitting distance apart in rows of rusty RVs but “value simple pleasures and friendships are treated like gold.”

In “The Untitled 19th* News Film,” co-directors Chelsea Hernandez, Heather Courtney and Princess A. Hairston follow a woman determined to “do something radical about the white men dominating newsrooms” where 70% of policy and politics editors are men, almost all white. Emily Ramshaw and fellow journalists launch The 19th* News, a digital start-up named after the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, but an asterisk acknowledges the Black women who were omitted.

“Weeping Rocks,” a Latvian-U.S. project by Karlis Bergs and Andrew Siedenburg expected to premiere in 2024, follows entomologist Arthur Shapiro and his groundbreaking 50-year project, hiking trails across the country, hand-counting butterflies while building the largest population database in the Northern Hemisphere.

The New Visions Forum also features 16 European projects with the most promising projects awarded by honors and resources from the likes of AmDocs, Prague’s UPP post house, Soundsquare audio studios, the digital platform DAFilms.com, distributor Taskovski Films and orgs such as Cannes Docs – Marché du Film, the Documentary Association of Europe and European Film Market.

The Ji.hlava New Visions Market features another 24 European films looking for co-productions, with filmmakers available for meetings with fest industry guests. Projects selected for both forum and market may take part in the Ji.hlava Matchmaking Accelerator, which features several hundred accredited film professionals from fest representatives to curators, distributors, sales agents, commissioning editors and international journalists.

One U.S. filmmaker who went through the program last year, Adriana Barbosa, says it was a real boon for her doc “Swing and Sway,” the story of two isolated women connecting via video letters.

The program presented “a great opportunity to share the project with the European market before the completion and release,” Barbosa says, adding that her status as a recent immigrant to the U.S. from Brazil offered her a unique perspective: “Filmmakers and producers have difficulties to navigate in other territories than North America,” she noted, “limiting their projects to a specific audience. This initiative from Ji.hlava in creating a space for U.S. docs is a great opportunity for films that are looking to take their projects to the European market to share them with broader audiences.”

Barbosa’s co-director, Fernanda Pessoa, says the boost from Ji.hlava’s New Visions program led to major successes for their film, which wrapped last year, premiered as the opening film of the Olhar de Cinema International Film Festival in Brazil, screened in competition at Sheffield DocFest, and was then accepted for DOK Leipzig and Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal.

“The pitch preparation really helped us craft our presentation and understand the strengths of our film,” Pessoa adds.

Gabrielle Ewing, who is directing her first feature-length doc, “Credible Fear,” about the U.S. asylum system, says she and her producer gained useful insights during the first year of Ji.hlava’s New Visions.

“We learned so much from the individualized pitching seminar and appreciated getting to know other documentary producers from around the world,” she says. “We made some wonderful connections with distributors in the European community that we hope to reach back out to when we’re closer to our premiere.”

Doc producer/director Chivas DeVinck, whose “The Sea, the Island and the People” made it into the Deal Maker competition at Hot Docs, says the Ji.hlava program was soon followed by expanding the film’s team.

“Soon after pitching my project at the forum last year I was able to attach producers Eric Nyari from Cineric Creative and Charlotte Uzu from Les Films d’Ici. Now we’re currently attempting to secure funding from contacts that we made through Hot Docs.”

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