Participants & Projects

DHĀKIRA: THROUGH QASSEM’S EYES (PT)

Production company: Omaja

Producer: Bernardo Lopes

Director: Balolas Carvalho

In 1988, during the First Intifada, a pair of eyes from Gaza appeared on the cover of TIME magazine. The gaze belonged to Qassem: a journalist, member of the resistance, and future founder of Ramattan, Palestine’s first independent television news agency. Decades later, we reconnect with the man behind that iconic image: exiled in Egypt, caught between silence and hope, tending the land as he awaits the moment to return to Gaza to rebuild, for the fifth time, his home and his dream.

HUSTLE (CZ)

Production company: Storylab

Producer: Damian Machaj, Hana Němečková

Director: Damian Machaj

What are we really selling when we sell the dream of freedom? Going undercover into the closed online meetings of Czech MLM companies, journalist Miroslav Harant exposes the recruitment tactics, motivational rhetoric, and group pressure hidden behind the promise of passive income and being your own boss. Through the stories of those who spent years and small fortunes chasing that promise, Hustle traces how a culture born in the post-1989 boom has come to define success for a new generation.

THE INVISIBLE COLORS OF THE SPECTRUM (SK)

Production company: promovie s.r.o.

Producer: Marek Vaňous

Director: Marek Vaňous

When a writer discovers that he is on the autism spectrum, many events from his life finally begin to make sense. What should have been a liberating discovery of his own identity instead becomes another struggle with a world that often fails to understand his differences. The film follows his search for justice after losing not only his book, but also his trust and sense of safety during its publication process. It reveals the everyday reality of living with Asperger’s syndrome – the invisible obstacles, exhaustion, uncertainty and the constant effort required to navigate a society that is not designed for a different perception of the world. It is a story about trust, exploitation, finding one’s own voice, and searching for justice where the law alone cannot provide it.

LULLABIES OF EUROPE (SK)

Production company: ArtSo s.r.o.

Producer: Tomas Sotak

Director: Dušan Rapoš

Lullabies of Europe is a documentary series exploring the disappearing tradition of lullabies across Europe. Each 25-minute episode focuses on one country, uncovering its cultural identity through songs, personal stories, local history and living traditions. The Slovak episode serves as the pilot, demonstrating the format and production model. The long-term vision is to create a pan-European collection of documentaries that preserves Europe’s intangible cultural heritage while building a broadcast-ready international series.

SCREEN KIDS (SK)

Production company: ARINAFILM s.r.o

Producer: Silvia Panáková, Jan Hubáček

Director: Viktória Rampal Dzurenko

Pediatricians Cyril Matějka and Branislav Chrenka witness the epidemic of infant screen addiction daily. Waging a quixotic war, they launch an off-grid digital detox retreat in the Beskydy Mountains. Stripped of phones for ten days, parents and doctors confront fractured relationships. The film reveals a radical truth: to protect children, adults must face their own dependency.

A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING EUROPE (SK)

Production company: filmsomnia

Producer: Alena Kapinajová, Anna Mach Rumanová

Director: Robo Mihály

While Europe commemorates its heroes, protects its borders and rehearses its old traumas, a camera wanders through landscapes of memory, violence and absurdity, searching for what lies beneath the idea of Europe itself. A fragmented journey across a continent haunted by its past and trapped in its present – where Mediterranean shipwrecks, forgotten wars, street revolts and fragile acts of solidarity reveal a society constantly negotiating the limits of its own humanity.

THE SEARCH FOR ITZA (CAT)

Production company: Associació de Periodisme Fora de Quadre

Producer: Marc Serena, Teresa Ruiz, Cristina Mora

Director: Neus Ràfols Garcia

A journalist, Neus, investigates the Nicaraguan exiles arriving in Barcelona to uncover why Sandinism is promoting an authoritarian regime, 46 years after the triumph of its Revolution. In her search, she meets Itza, a young “Nica” refugee who is also marked by her deceased father, a Barcelona native. Trapped by the same question, the two embark on a crucial and emotional journey that takes them to Costa Rica, where the core of the political resistance is currently concentrated.