From April 20-22, 2023, Verzió, in cooperation with Belvedere 21, Open Society University Network (OSUN) and Central European University, will present highlights from the latest Verzió Film Festival in Budapest in Vienna. 

Verzió Vienna features seven powerful documentaries and several masterclasses. An additional outreach event, the “alternative posters” exhibition, will highlight creative works by graphic design students from Budapest Metropolitan University.

We believe the new partnerships and connections established during Verzió Vienna will prove lasting, and contribute to foregrounding the medium of creative documentary as an engaging way to learn about the world and empower through moving human stories. 

Opening Ceremony: April 20, 6 p.m., Belvedere 21, Blickle Kino
Welcome speech by Shalini Randeria, CEU President and Rector
Opening Film: Away (d.: Ruslan Fedotow, Hungary, Belgium, Portugal, 2022, 28’, Ukrainian)

Alternative Film Poster Exhibition:

Exhibition opening with small reception: April 11, 5:40 p.m. CEU Cafeteria

The posters on display are works produced by the Budapest Metropolitan University’s (METU) graphic design MA students under the mentorship of Krzysztof Ducki and Veronika Kovács. They were made in cooperation with the Verzio Film Festival, which invited the students to make their own, “alternative” versions of film posters based on their own creative response to the films. 

The initiative is part of the UniVerzió program which invites university students to dive into the world of creative documentary films. The graphic design students freely chose the films from the programme of Verzio in 2022; their diverse approaches to poster creation highlight both the impressive creativity of the students and the festival’s rich programme. These graphic works offer new perspectives on the films, inviting the visitors to explore the associative and laconic expressivity of the genre, and raise curiosity about the films. The colorful, multifaceted range of posters communicates the vibrant festival mood and brings the festival highlights to the attention of the CEU Vienna community. 

Exhibiting artists: Emese Fekete, Ágnes Kapitány-Szabó, András László Péter, Krisztina Román, Enikő Falcsik, Lili Kláben, Vivien Oroslán, Gábriel Kristyák, Virág Dobó, Júlia Varga, Diána Horváth, Noémi Böröcz, Zsófia Hajdú, Alicia Csizmár

Dates and venue of the screenings: April 20–22 , 2023, Belvedere 21, Blickle Kino
(Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Wien, Austria)

SCREENING SCHEDULE:

20 April	6 p.m.	Away + Q&A | TICKETS
20 April	7:15 p.m.	Opening reception
20 April	8:30 p.m.	The Killing of a Journalist + online Q&A | TICKETS
21 April	6 p.m.	f@ck this job | TICKETS
21 April	8 p.m.	Nelly and Nadine + Q&A | TICKETS
22 April	4 p.m.	KIM + masterclass | TICKETS
22 April	6:30 p.m.	Boney Piles + online Q&A | TICKETS
22 April	8:30 p.m.	All that Breathes | TICKETS

SCHEDULE OF THE MASTERCLASSES:

21 April	4 p.m.	Family Secrets:Using archives to tell the story of a Holocaust survivor. Masterclass by Magnus Gertten, filmmaker, director of Nelly & Nadine (2022)	Central European University, Quellenstraße 51, 1100 Wien | REGISTER HERE
22 April	4 p.m.	Working with a vulnerable protagonist: The making of KIM. Masterclass by Erika Kapronczai	Belvedere 21, Blickle Kino Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Wien

Family Secrets: Using archives to tell the story of a Holocaust survivor
Masterclass by Magnus Gertten, filmmaker, director of Nelly & Nadine (2022)

Magnus Gertten is an award-winning director from Malmö, Sweden. Among his latest docs are the investigating of an archive film reel in Every Face Has a Name (2015), the football doc Becoming Zlatan (2016), the human rights doc Only the Devil Lives without Hope (2020) and the love story of Nelly & Nadine, which premiered at Berlinale in 2022. Nelly & Nadine has so far been screened at more than 100 international film festivals and won 22 awards. Magnus Gertten’s documentaries are character-driven, often made in an intimate style and with a powerful emotional narrative. He has a strong passion for human stories, music and modern history. In many of his films Magnus has been working with archive footage. At the masterclass, Magnus Gertten will discuss the research and making of Nelly & Nadine and his earlier films that involve the use of family archives, newsreels and survivor’s testimonies.

The masterclass is free and open to the public but registration is required. Please register by filling this form. 

Working with a vulnerable protagonist: The making of KIM
Masterclass by Erika Kapronczai, director of KIM (2022)

Erika Kapronczai graduated from the University of Pécs with a degree in aesthetics, then from the University of Theatre and Film Arts with a degree in film directing. She is co-founder and creative producer of the international audiovisual dream collection DREAMPIRE. In addition to directing short feature films (Well under the Sun; Threesome), she also produces documentaries and portraits (Dreampire; Sajdik; Kim; F - The Man with the Antenna). She is currently working on her first feature film and is supporting first feature projects as a creative producer, and teaches dramaturgy in the Budapest Metropolitan University. The masterclass focuses on the process of working with the private archive of her film’s protagonist, Kim Corbisier, a talented emerging artist and an enigmatic personality, whose struggle with family traumas and addiction cut her life short at 27, leaving behind a powerful artworks and intimate archival footage. She will also share the considerations behind the focus of the film, the structure, and further moral and legal issues emerged during the film making process, as well as the challenges and dilemmas of the role and responsibility of being a filmmaker and a human being at the same time. 

The masterclass can be attended with a ticket purchased for the film screening. Buy the tickets here. 

FILMS:

AWAY
(Hungary, Belgium, Portugal, 2022, 28’, Ukrainian)

Andrii and Alisa, Ukrainian teenagers, have escaped the shelling of their native Kharkiv to Budapest. They hold after-school drawing classes for Ukrainian refugee children, and await news from their families back home. News reports and phone calls with family bring the harsh everyday reality of the war into their lives, while their street art protest engages and provokes the passersby.

DIRECTOR 
Born in Belarus, Ruslan Fedotow began his career as a cinematographer. He graduated from the Academy of Arts and moved to Moscow, and finished a degree at the Moscow School of New Cinema in 2015. He worked as a cinematographer for many documentary films that were screened at festivals like the LA Film Festival, Vision du Réel, and Hotdocs. Since then he has experimented with documentary filmmaking. His documentary Where Are We Headed? premiered at IDFA in 2021, and won awards for best first feature and best cinematography. Ruslan is currently a student at DocNomads. Away is his first-year work film.

NELLY & NADINE
(Sweden, Belgium, Norway, 2022, 92’, French, English, Swedish, Spanish)

Nelly & Nadine is the unlikely love story of two women falling in love in the Ravensbrück concentration camp on Christmas Eve, 1944. Despite being separated in the last months of the war, Nelly and Nadine managed to reunite and spend the rest of their lives together. Their love story was kept secret for many years, even from some of their closest family. Nelly’s granddaughter, Sylvie, opens Nelly and Nadine’s never-before-seen personal archives and tell their remarkable story.

DIRECTOR
Magnus Gertten is a director and producer born in Limhamn, Sweden, in 1953. He was a television and radio journalist for several years before turning to filmmaking in 1998. He has made 15 documentaries for Swedish and international television, which have been broadcast and screened at festivals in more than 60 countries, and which have won numerous awards. He works as a director, producer, narrative consultant, and adviser for his film production company, Auto Images.

THE KILLING OF A JOURNALIST
(Denmark, Czech Republic, USA, 2022, 100’, Slovak, English)

Investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée were brutally murdered in 2018. Their deaths inspired the biggest protests in Slovakia since the fall of communism. The investigation into their deaths takes an unexpected turn when a secret file is leaked to the murdered journalist’s colleagues. It includes messages from the alleged mastermind of the assassination, a businessman closely connected to the country’s ruling party. Trawling through the encrypted messages, journalists discover that their country has been taken over by corrupt oligarchs, judges, and law enforcement officials. A reckoning awaits.

DIRECTOR
Matt Sarnecki is a journalist, producer, and film director at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He earned a BA in political science and history at Columbia University. He spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania before moving to Prague, Czech Republic, where he held a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts. In 2011 he moved to San Francisco, and earned a master’s degree in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2013 he has lived in Bucharest, Romania. His documentary Killing Pavel, about the murder of investigative journalist Pavel Sheremet, won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Medal in 2017, and the DIG Award (Italy) in 2018.

F@CK THIS JOB
(United Kingdom, Germany, 2021, 104’, Russian, English, German)

In 2008, Natalia Sindeeva, a successful, wealthy woman, decided to launch an independent TV station in Putin’s Russia, not knowing she would end up losing a fortune fighting on the frontlines between truth and propaganda. Sindeeva hires opposition reporters and LGBTQ staff members, and soon her station becomes a lone island of political and sexual freedom. Dozhd TV (also known as TV Rain) was, for a long time, the only independent news station to report on the issues that became taboo in Russian state-run media.

DIRECTOR
Vera Krichevskaya is the co-founder of Dozhd (TV Rain) Russia, the only independent, private television channel in Russia. She is also an award-winning television director, having worked for NTV and 24DOC as a senior producer and director.

KIM
(Hungary, 2022, 85’, Hungarian, English, French, German)

Kim Corbisier was an enigmatic figure in Budapest. Ten years ago, director Erika Kapronczai approached her to make a short film, but after spending some time with Kim, abandoned this idea to document her struggle with methadone addiction, a project which also went unfinished when Kim committed suicide at the age of 27, leaving behind a small, but powerful oeuvre. Kim left Kapronczai her video camera along with some mesmerizing footage, which became their third and only completed film collaboration.

DIRECTOR
Erika Kapronczai graduated from the University of Pécs with a degree in aesthetics, then from the University of Theatre and Film Arts with a degree in film directing. She is co-founder and creative producer of the international audiovisual dream collection DREAMPIRE. In addition to directing short feature films (Well under the Sun; THREESOME), she also produces documentaries and portraits (CEU20; DREAMPIRE; Sajdik; INFORG PORTRAITS; KIM; F - The Man with the Antenna). She is currently working on her first feature film and is supporting first feature projects as a creative producer.

BONEY PILES
(Ukraine, 2022, 80’, Ukrainian, Russian)

Nastya was six years old when three Russian missiles hit her house on New Year's Eve. She survived, but lost her father, childhood, and faith in life. For those like her, the war has become a daily reality and the landscape outside her window. Yet Nastya still has her dreams; she longs for a new house and a dog, and writes to Santa, asking him to bring her father back.

DIRECTOR
Taras Tomenko is a member of European Film Academy Film. He is a director, scriptwriter, born February 6, 1976, Kyiv, Ukraine. He was educated at Karpenko-Kary Kyiv State University of Theatre, Cinema and Television Arts, Department of Cinema and Television Arts and Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University, Department of Philology. At the 2001 Berlinale he won the Panorama award for Tyr (Shooting Gallery). 

ALL THAT BREATHES
(India, USA, United Kingdom, 2022, 94’, Hindi)

In one of the world’s most populated cities, brothers Nadeem and Saud devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite. This majestic bird of prey is essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi, but has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the “kite brothers” spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian hospital. The film explores the connection between the kites and the brothers, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.

DIRECTOR
Shaunak Sen is a filmmaker and film scholar based in New Delhi, India. Cities of Sleep (2016), his first feature-length documentary, was shown at major international film festivals (including DOK Leipzig, DMZ Docs and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival), and won six international awards. Shaunak received the IDFA Bertha Fund (2019), the Sundance Documentary Grant (2019), the Catapult Film Fund (2020), the Charles Wallace Grant, the Sarai CSDS Digital Media Fellowship (2014), and the Films Division of India Fellowship (2013). He was also a visiting scholar at Cambridge University (2018), and has published academic articles in Bioscope, Widescreen and other journals.