For the first time in the festival’s history, thanks to the support of Bank Millennium and cooperation with Change Serviceplan advertising agency, selected films will be available with audio description and voice overs available in the AudioMovie app. AudioMovie is a smartphone app, which plays additional sountracks and and synchronises them with films. All you need is to bring your smartphone and headphones and use it to watch the film while listening to the audio description or voice over. Such an app provides people with various needs with the opportunity to participate in and experience a film show regardless of impairments or lack thereof, linguistic prowess or age.

Thanks to subtitles for the hard-of-hearing these film shows will also be available to people with hearing impairments. – There are over 1.8 million people with visual impairments and 800,000 people with hearing impairments living in Poland today. Thanks to audio description, voice over and subtitles for the hard-of-hearing we enable at least some of them to fully participate in the festival – Iwona Jarzębska, Director of the Public Relations Department of Bank Millennium, said. – We want to open the festival for viewers hithertofore excluded. We believe that viewers with visual or hearing impairments have the right to experience art in a manner, which is free of barriers. This is a solution, which is conducive to integration because viewers without impairments as well as those who cannot see or hear can attend the same film show and experience it deeply.

Bank Millennium has been a sponsor of MILLENIUM DOCS AGAINST GRAVITY since 2006. In 2016 it became the naming rights sponsor and this year it has also become a sponsor of audio description and subtitles for the deaf

Films with audio description and subtitles of the deaf will be shown on 10-19 May in Kinoteka in Warsaw and DCF in Wrocław. These include four titles with very diversified subjects. In “My Generation” by David Batty, the famous actor and Academy Award winner Sir Michael Caine brings back the climate of swinging London from the 1960s. Isa Willinger, director of the film “Hi, A.I.” presents relationships between people and personal robots and considers the capabilities and limits of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile the protagonists of the film “Talking About Trees” by Suhaib Gasmelbari - winner of the Award for Best Documentary Film at this year’s Berlinale - are four venerable Sudanese former film makers who decide to renovate a former cinema near Khartoum. The piano tuner in “Piano to Zanskar” (directed by Michał Sulima) works in London’s Camden Town, however one day he decides to take a hundred-year-old piano to one of the most isolated settlements in the Himalayas. As you can see everything is possible with Millennium Docs Against Gravity.

Persons with visual impairments and their assistants as well as the hard-of-hearing will be able to buy tickets for film shows with audio description and subtitles for the hard-of-hearing for the price of PLN 12. You must sign up for the film shows: kinoteka@audiomovie.pl for shows in Warsaw and dcf@audiomovie.pl for shows in Wrocław.