“People became lonelier”: Ji.hlava’s Marek Hovorka on the festival’s 30th anniversary and why we still need spaces to meet and disagree.
As the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival marks 30 years, its founder and director Marek Hovorka talks about growing up with the festival, the changing place of non-fiction cinema, and why people still need to meet in the same room.
Marek Hovorka was still a secondary school student in Jihlava when he started a documentary film festival in his hometown. That was in 1997. He founded it together with a group of classmates, went on to graduate in documentary film studies at FAMU in Prague, and has directed the festival ever since. Today, he also teaches a seminar on festival studies at FAMU.
Under his direction, Ji.hlava has become the largest documentary festival in Central and Eastern Europe, known for its focus on auteur and experimental non-fiction cinema and for its motto, “Thinking through film.” Alongside the festival, it runs an industry platform and the Inspiration Forum. Marek is also a co-founder of Doc Alliance, a partnership of European documentary festivals behind the online platform DAFilms.com.
I met him in Jihlava during the festival’s 30th anniversary to ask what three decades of running it have taught him.
Marek measures the anniversary in personal terms. “It’s two-thirds of my life,” he says. At some point he realised he had spent more of his life with the festival than without it. For him it is a dedication, but also collective work. “I value the energy that comes from the interviews, the festival visits and the effort to create ‘a space which is really open for new ideas,’ and to define what position documentary filmmaking holds today and what role a festival can play in it.”
He does not plan far ahead. Every year, he says, is “not for granted,” because the festival has to fight for its financing and its position. “When the first edition took place I was not thinking about a 30th, and now I am not thinking about a 60th. What I do believe is that the festival is ‘some kind of creative gesture, not just an event,’ and that it will keep its own space in society and in the art world,” he adds.
Ji.hlava is now known internationally, but Marek describes the local reaction as mixed. Over the years, he says, people have realised that the festival puts Jihlava in a good light and brings Czech and international media to the town. Some residents regret that it lasts only a few days; others find the nights too noisy. “It’s a festival, you know, it’s a celebration,” he says. “People get together like when you have a birthday celebration.”
He compares it to visiting a camp or a music festival. Visitors leave their routine at home—the work, school, and childcare—and can do what interests them. “It’s coming back to yourself in a way,” he says, and that, in his view, is why people return year after year.
He chose documentary filmmaking because of an early interest in journalism. At 12 or 13, he wanted to be a journalist, but he found that an article’s life is short. He and his friends also went to the cinema in Jihlava about three times a week, since there was little else in the way of culture at the time. Documentary seemed to sit between journalism and artwork. Fiction, by contrast, looked to him like “a pretty huge circus,” with hundreds of people needed on a set. Documentary felt closer to reality and daily life. “At the time, I didn’t know that if you run a film festival bigger and bigger, there are also hundreds of people running around you,” he adds.
Asked what advice he would give his younger self, he says none. Mistakes, in his view, are part of discovering things. “I am not surprised when colleagues make them, but I am unhappy when the same mistake appears twice, because that means nobody reflected on the cause.” He describes Ji.hlava as a process rather than a plan. There was no large idea at the start of a festival with seven or eight cinemas, an industry platform and an Inspiration Forum. It grew step by step, and Hovorka says that openness to reacting to what happens is part of its character.
The festival also grew out of a specific community. One reason he founded it was that he wanted to become a filmmaker, and he went on to study documentary at FAMU. From the beginning the festival was close to young filmmakers, who used its space and opportunities to help a new generation appear. It was connected to its audience, he says, but also to the needs of the film community.
Ji.hlava started as a domestic festival. The first international edition was the third, in 1999, and Marek says it was largely a question of possibilities. That year the festival gave its Award for Contribution to World Cinema to Victor Kossakovsky, who was still in his thirties. Kossakovsky has attended almost every year since, and presented two new films at this edition. He told Marek that the award gave him confidence that his work was meaningful and worth continuing, even though the prize usually goes to filmmakers around 80.
The field looked very different then. In the 1990s there were almost no dedicated documentary festivals. He names IDFA and festivals such as Krakow as early exceptions, and notes that Visions du Réel was then mainly a showcase for films from Eastern Europe. Most of the documentary festivals that exist today were founded later. It took Ji.hlava three years to be sure it wanted to run every year, and only after that did the team begin travelling to other festivals to find films abroad.
That history shapes how he views the form today. Documentary has moved from the straightforward reportage of earlier decades towards more experimental work. Marek welcomes the shift. “The richness of documentary is in independence, in creative openness, and in this huge diversity in approaches,” he says. He finds fiction stricter in form. “I miss surprises in fiction cinema, mostly. Sometimes when you read a synopsis, you know how the film would look before going to the cinema.” A documentary, he says, is rooted in daily life, so there is always something that takes the viewer by surprise.
The programme reflects that range. Testimonies is open to topical films and documentary blockbusters. First Lights is for first-time filmmakers, and Opus Bonum is for second and later films with a more authorial handwriting. Experimental films have their own section. “It’s really good to put all the people in one place,” he says, adding that there is no age barrier among filmmakers. When the festival wanted to be closer to filmmakers, it built platforms such as the New Visions Forum and DAFilms, its video-on-demand service.
Marek Hovorka does not describe the present as an easy time for the genre. “We are living in tough times, and documentary was never in a stable position, but it’s getting more unstable,” he says. Still, he sees documentary filmmakers as having a privilege that once belonged to the media: the ability to spend months or years with a topic, a region or a person. Since the media moved online, he says, that privilege has passed to documentary filmmakers and non-fiction writers, and a 90-minute film reaches wider than a book, because it is easier to watch than to read. The mission, he says, is to protect it, because “there are many people who don’t want to keep this type of critical mind in society.”
Marek prefers to call the industry a community, because people need an environment where they support one another, and he says a strong independent scene is crucial. Even in a country as large as India, he notes, it is not easy to make an independent fiction film. He points to the role of the Rotterdam festival, which for decades brought independent filmmakers forward. Independent films do not necessarily find a huge audience, he says, but they make real art part of a country’s culture, and “real art, it resists.” Their value is measured not only when they are made but 10 or 20 years later, which changes how the numbers should be read.
On whether an audience for documentary still exists, he is optimistic. He believes audiences in Europe are growing, partly because “everybody has cameras in their pockets.” He recalls Richard Leacock, the documentary pioneer, visiting Ji.hlava in 2000 and championing digital media at a time when many filmmakers insisted on celluloid and certified 35 mm prints. Leacock wanted everybody to be able to make a film, the way everybody can write a book or a poem. He is glad this has happened. He notes that children now shoot Instagram posts and see how changing the music changes the mood of an image. “They are really becoming filmmakers,” he says, and he expects documentary filmmaking to keep growing.
Personal experience of making something, he argues, makes people want spaces and teaching that extend that experience, and this builds critical thinking. People who create, he says, understand the rules behind images and are not so easily influenced. “That’s why art and creating is so important,” he says.
My last question was what he wants to add to Ji.hlava over the next five years. He did not name a new programme. He spoke instead about how daily habits have changed. People order food by courier instead of going to restaurants, take Uber or Bolt instead of public transport, and watch Netflix instead of going to the cinema. “People became lonelier and depend only on the smaller circle of people they are in connection with,” he says. In his view, this is a danger, because people stop meeting those they disagree with and begin to see it as normal to be only among people with the same opinion, which he calls “very unhealthy.”
After the pandemic, he says, it is essential to create events where people can meet others with different opinions and different contexts. “That’s the identity for the festival,” he says.
The largest festival of auteur documentary cinema in Central and Eastern Europe, the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival celebrates its 30th edition from October 23 to November 1, 2026.
