Millennium Docs Against Gravity Festival Director on How Documentary Film Helps Audiences Find ‘Sense Amid the Chaos’ of Current Events

Poland’s Millennium Docs Against Gravity, the documentary film festival that takes place simultaneously across seven Polish cities, returns for its 23rd edition from May 7 – 17 with a focus on the audience-facing attitude that has helped it evolve from a scrappy local affair into the country’s largest film festival.

“Our main goal from day one has been to build up a documentary mass audience,” says festival director Artur Liebhart. “It was a very ambitious goal, and I think we are on our way to achieving that.”

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Last year’s edition racked up more than 180,000 admissions, bolstered by a wide-ranging program that’s not afraid to shy away from the controversial or political — the event opened with “Coexistence, My Ass!,” director Amber Fares’ probing documentary about Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster Eliassi — while also unabashedly striving to put the “festive” back in “festival.”

“We have not [created] this festival for hardcore documentary lovers only. We would like to make it for everybody,” Liebhart explains. “It’s not only quality films on various subjects — politics, culture, pop culture — but also creating a lot of events around the films.” 

That approach includes concerts, photo exhibitions, dance recitals and other happenings curated to stimulate conversation around the films on offer. Organizers are also proud of their wide-ranging efforts to support audience members with special needs, with Leibhart noting that every film in this year’s main competition “will have a full package of technical accessibility” for special-needs viewers in all seven cities to host screenings.

The festival’s 23rd edition opens May 7 with “Closure,” from Polish director Michał Marczak, which follows a father’s obsessive search for his vanished son and its devastating aftermath. The film — described as a “stunner” by Variety’s Murtada Elfadl after its Sundance premiere — won top honors at the Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival in March. The physical festival wraps May 17, with online screenings to run from May 19 – June 1.

Highlights from the main competition include “Nuisance Bear,” directors Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner; “Time and Water,” the latest from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sara Dosa (“Fire of Love”); “A Child of My Own,” from two-time Academy Award nominee Maite Alberdi (“The Mole Agent”); and “Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird),” which earned a special jury prize for directors Anna Fitch and Banker White at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. 

World premieres include “Bodies (of War),” from two-time Berlinale prizewinner Małgorzata Szumowska (“Body,” “Mug”) and Michał Englert, and “Cooking Up Democracy,” from pioneering German filmmaker Monika Treut, who returns to a festival she first attended in 2004, during its inaugural edition, when her documentary “Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities” was among just 17 films screening for local audiences.

Treut is one of the filmmakers being feted in Millennium Doc’s new Masters section, celebrating the auteurs of documentary filmmaking, among them Oscar-nominated “I Am Not Your Negro” director Raoul Peck, with a screening of “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,” as well as iconic German auteur Werner Herzog, with his 2025 Venice premiere “Ghost Elephants.” Other programming strands include “In the Name of the Father and the Son,” which features films that push back against stereotypes surrounding masculinity to explore intimacy and family dynamics, and “All Eyes on Palestine,” a selection of documentaries that address both the current conflict and the events that led to it.

Perhaps the biggest new addition to Millennium Docs Against Gravity this year is the launch of the Documentary Grand Prix for best documentary film of the year by FIPRESCI, the international body for film critics. The winner, which was selected through a vote by the group’s members, will be announced at the festival’s opening ceremony. Calling it the “crown” of this year’s event, Liebhart says the award represents a huge vote of confidence from FIPRESCI and underscores the importance of the Polish festival in the international documentary landscape. 

Running parallel to Millennium Docs Against Gravity is an industry event that will bring more than 200 delegates to Warsaw for a series of masterclasses, workshops and pitching sessions for both short- and long-form documentary films. 

“We started building our presence in the industry five years ago, and the response was enormous,” notes Liebhart. “But it was enormous because we had already been positioned as an event dedicated to documentary film which has built an audience in a country of 45 million in Central Europe.”

The theme of this year’s event is “Searching,” which Liebhart says points to a collective need to find “sense amid the chaos” of current affairs — particularly as the news is filtered through social media. “We are trying to show through the lens of filmmakers a world which people can understand,” he says.

Likewise, as our feeds get increasingly clogged by AI slop that makes it impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction, Liebhart insists documentary filmmaking can serve as “an anchor where people can find something that they can trust.” This year’s event, he adds, is “a search for understanding all this.”