CALL FOR DOCUMENTARY FILMS
20th FAITO DOC FESTIVAL 2027 – Theme: TIME
23–31 July 2027

The 20th Faito Doc Festival invites submissions to its International Feature Film Competition, International Short Film Competition, and International Documentary Short Film Competition for Film Schools. The call is open to auteur, experimental and animated documentaries of any length: features, shorts and ultra-shorts.

This edition is dedicated to the theme: TIME.

Federico Fellini once described feeling a kind of exhilaration when someone was late for an appointment or a commitment was cancelled at the last minute. That unexpected emptiness became a gift of time. Time suddenly set free, to be enjoyed without any particular purpose.
For Saint Augustine, the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, and the present is constantly slipping away. Yet time runs through every moment of our lives.
In Alain Resnais’s cinema, the past is never dead: it coexists with the present, weighs upon it and continually overlaps with it, in the memories, dreams and images we preserve.
For Andrei Tarkovsky, filmmaking means sculpting time, stripping away the superfluous to reveal the profound, intimate duration of human experience.

But what does it mean to experience time today?

In an ever-faster world, where information travels instantly and images proliferate, what room is left for waiting, memory, listening and contemplation?
Do we all experience time in the same way? How do places, emotions and the different stages of life shape our perception of it? Does the time of nature coincide with human time? What remains of the past in our lives, and how do we imagine the future? Time can separate us, but it can also bring us together. It can erase traces or bring memories back to life. It can be a wound, a promise, a period of waiting, a discovery.
How can cinema make visible the time that passes, the time that remains and the time that slips away from us?
The Faito Doc Festival invites filmmakers to explore these questions through documentary works that surprise, move us and challenge the way we see the world.
We are looking for films that explore time in its many dimensions: intimate and collective, human and natural, social, political, spiritual and artistic.
Films that do more than tell stories about time: films that allow us to feel it, move through it and perhaps experience it differently.

SELECTION CRITERIA
The selection committees will give priority to:
• Point of view: an original, personal perspective on reality;
• Empathy: the filmmaker’s ability to listen to and accompany their subjects, and to portray the places they film;
• Cinematic language: storytelling that goes beyond straightforward reportage, with creative visual and sound editing and a sense of rhythm and poetry;
• Engagement with the theme: the ability to interpret and explore “Time” from philosophical, social, political, spiritual or artistic perspectives;
• Reflection on reality: films that offer fresh perspectives on the world, encourage critical thinking and exchange, and engage with social and environmental issues, memory and the future.

HOW TO SUBMIT
Send a screening link to your film (Vimeo, Google Drive or another file-sharing platform), together with any required password and English subtitles, to faitodocfestival@gmail.com. Each filmmaker may submit up to two works.
Submission deadline: 27 March 2027.
Entry fee: free of charge.