The call for entries for the 20 edition of Documenta Madrid competition is now open

Documenta Madrid, annual international meeting point for creators, professionals and the public to whom their films are directed, will take place in the spring. In this its 19th edition, the Madrid City Council’s International Film Festival, organised by its Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport, will begin this year on 24 May in both in-person and online formats. Its on-site screenings will end on 29 May while its online version will continue until 5 June.

The call for entries for its National and International competitive sections - aimed at films completed after 1 January 2021 - will remain open from today until 20 March. The Corte Final section - which supports national productions and projects - will remain open until 31 March. The winning films and projects in the three sections included in this year’s call will share more than 36,000 euros in cash prizes. Once again, this year, Corte Final will have a cash prize of 4,000 euros.

Once again, this year, the festival returns to Madrid to showcase the best films from all over the world, focusing on contemporary cinema and placing special emphasis on new aesthetic approaches, films that draw their inspiration from the myriad forms of non-fiction and explore audiovisual forms regardless of their definition, duration, genre or category.

In line with the changes the festival has made in recent editions, the 19th edition of Documenta Madrid is reinforcing its defence of a cinema without labels. All films, whether long or short, documentary, essay, hybrid or experimental, compete on equal terms, the only distinction being between national and international productions.

• DOWNLOAD THE DOCUMENTA MADRID 2023 REGULATIONS
• ACCESS THE SUBMISSION FORM FOR THE COMPETITIVE SECTIONS

Sections and awards

In its 20th edition, the festival has two competitive sections, International and National, each of them endowed with three different awards: the Jury Award for Best Film, endowed with 10,000 € for each section; the Fugas Jury Award, endowed with 5,000 € also for each section, aimed at rewarding innovation and willingness to cross borders; and the Cineteca Madrid Audience Award, endowed with 1,000 € per section, the latter awarded by audience voting. For their part, the films selected for Corte Final will once again this year be eligible for a cash prize of 4,000 €.

In addition, the jury may award a special mention for each category -National Competition, International Competition and Final Cut-, endowed with a diploma. And the films in the National Competitive Section will also be eligible to receive the CineZeta Award, given by the young programmers of Cinezeta, at Cineteca Madrid, also endowed with a diploma. This award, incorporated into the festival for the first time in the last edition, is given by decision of the 10 members of the team of young programmers of CineZeta, the program of Cineteca Madrid that invites young people under 26 to learn first-hand the craft of film programming, bringing their own proposals every Saturday to the screen of the Sala Borau.

Participation and selection

Among the participation requirements published in the rules of the 20th edition of the Documenta Madrid Festival for the International and National competitions, it is included that all films must have been completed after January 1, 2022. Registration is completely free and will be done exclusively online, through the festival's official website, at this link. The deadline to submit films for the national and international competition will remain open until February 19, 2022.

Regarding Corte Final, the rules of participation of the 20th edition of the Documenta Madrid Festival state that Spanish production or co-production films that have completed the shooting phase or are in the final phase, and that have an advanced editing cut, may participate. This registration is also completely free and will be made exclusively online also until February 19, 2022.

The Selection Committee, which together with Cineteca's Artistic Direction is in charge of designing the festival's contents and selecting the films in competition, this year will be formed by Javier H. Estrada, head of programming at the Seville Festival and FILMADRID and professor at Camilo José Cela University; Ruth Somalo, programmer at DOC NYC and president of the Board of Directors of the Flaherty International Film Seminar; Karina Solórzano, programmer at FICUNAM and FiC Valdivia; and Ivan Granovsky, director of CATAPULTA, international film laboratory at UNAM, Mexico.

Any questions regarding the interpretation of the rules or the registration process of the films will be answered by the festival team at info@documentamadrid.com.

A 20 year old festival

This edition, Documenta Madrid is more than ever the flagship of Cineteca and the symbol of a nonconformist and restless cinephilia, a window to the world, its conflicts and its chimeras, with a rigorous but human vision, which transforms the viewer into an active agent of the encounter, establishing itself as an articulating and indispensable event of Madrid's culture.

Throughout 2023, the twentieth anniversary of Documenta Madrid will be present at Cineteca Madrid, which will join the festival this year with diverse proposals that will broaden the horizons of its programming.

More information
info@documentamadrid.com
www.documentamadrid.com