- We have been supporting this magnificent festival and sponsoring the Bank Millennium Main Award for 15 years already. Culture sponsoring is the main part of the Bank’s sponsorship activity, with Millennium Docs Against Gravity being our flagship project, which is why we want to share it with the broadest audience possible. With a view to persons with disabilities we shall continue the audio description project this year. Selected films and shows will feature subtitles for the deaf and audio description, which involves a verbal description of the visual content available through headphones. In this way blind and visually impaired persons, senior citizens as well as dyslectics and intellectually impaired persons can attend the festival without restrictions and enjoy the latest documentary productions from the whole world. Additionally this year they will be able to do it not only in cinemas but also in virtual space. After the great success of Docs Against Isolation in May - an online event, in this edition of the festival we shall open up to new ways of access to culture 360°, thus extending the audience with diverse needs. Supporting the event we break through barriers in access to culture, which reaches to where the public in Poland wants it, also to their homes – Iwona Jarzębska, Director of the Public Relations Department in Bank Millennium, said.

The festival, moved from May to September, will appear this year in no less than seven cities. In Warsaw, Wrocław, Katowice, Poznań, Lublin and Bydgoszcz the festival will take place from 4th to 13th September, in Gdynia from 9th to 18th September. Then between 19th September and 4th October the viewers will be able to see some of the 17th edition films online. During the press conference of the 17th edition of Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival we learned the first films qualified for the Bank Bank Millennium Grand Prix Competition. Titles submitted so far include “For Sama” - an Academy Award nominated films about the situation of people in Aleppo, directed by Waad Al-Khateab and Edward Watts.

Bank Millennium has been supporting the festival since 2006. In 2016 it became the naming rights sponsor of this event. Bank Millennium greatly values the selection of a unique repertoire as well as diversity of films shown at the Festival, which is crucial in reaching out to a diversified and demanding audience. Millennium Docs Against Gravity dwells on diverse subjects about the problems and needs of the contemporary world and people. It is liked and often visited by the public. During last year’s edition of the event we saw a record-setting growth of the audience. In the 16th Festival 93,000 people took part. We hope that the hybrid formula as well as audio description will add many more viewers.

Bank Millennium has been culturally involved for more than 30 years now. In parallel to its business it has been supporting national as well as local cultural events. It is a 360° sponsor of culture, because it promotes art in almost all its forms, including: music, painting, sculpture, film, theatre, photography, literature and performance. Bank Millennium reaches for niche and popular culture and is a long-term partner by design.

More details about the festival and more than 20 accompanying events are available on the festival’s website: mdag.pl