24.08.2020
17. Millennium Docs Against Gravity film festival - with audio description and subtitles for people with impaired hearing

During the upcoming already seventeenth edition of the biggest documentary films festival in Poland we will yet again give particular attention to the availability of culture to persons with vision and hearing impairments.
It is already the second year in which, thanks to the support of Bank Millennium and cooperation with Change Serviceplan advertising agency, selected films from the programme will be available with audio description and voice-overs for the deaf. In a joint effort with the Culture Without Barriers Foundation responsible for the preparation of the shows, the festival will present four carefully selected titles that touch upon various problems and well reflect the richness of the festival programme. Screenings of films with audio description will be held at the best times, thus offering access to the broadest group of viewers. Therefore, the festival gives everybody an opportunity to participate in and enjoy film screenings together. This year, for the first time, shows with audio description will be also held online, so that viewers from all over the country can take part in them!
- Millennium Docs Against Gravity is our flagship project, which we have been supporting for 15 years now - says Iwona Jarzębska, director of the Public Relations Department at Bank Millennium. - We want to share it with the broadest audience possible. Hence, we shall continue the audio description project this year. Selected films and shows will feature subtitles for the deaf and audio description, which consists in a verbal description of the visual content available through headphones. In this way, in September and October, blind and visually impaired persons, senior citizens as well as dyslectics and persons with intellectual impairments can attend the festival with no limitations and enjoy film emotions both in cinemas and in the virtual space.
Film shows with audio description and subtitles for the deaf will be held in Warsaw and Gdynia. Between 4th and 13th of September the festival will take place at the Warsaw Kinoteka and between 9th and 18th of September the screenings will be held in Gdynia Film Centre. Four unique hits of this year’s programme will take the audience to extremely different regions of the world. „iHuman” (directed by Tonje Hessen Schei) will take us on a trip to the engineers developing artificial intelligence in the Silicon Valley. In “Fat Front”, Louise Unmack Kjeldsen and Louise Detlefsen Isa Willinger pose some important questions on perception of our bodies in the contemporary world. In Eliza Kubarska’s „The Wall of Shadows”, alpinists Marcin Tomaszewski, Dmitri Gołowczenko and Sergiej Nilow will take the festival audience to the Himalayas. And the fourth film, to be screened with audio description and subtitles for the deaf in Warsaw and Gdynia, will tell the story of mother and daughter trapped in a besieged Syrian Aleppo. The film has been directed by Waad Al-Kateab, Syrian journalist, and Edward Watts, who - as he admits – has only helped Waad arrange the footage. This year, ”For Sama” was nominated for an Oscar® in the Documentary Feature category.
All the titles will be also available with audio description and subtitles for the deaf in the Millennium Docs Against Gravity online part that will last from 19th of September until 4th of October. Also some
Bank Millennium has been a sponsor of Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival since 2006. In 2016 it became the naming rights sponsor of this event.
More details about the festival and more than 20 accompanying events are available on the festival’s website: mdag.pl.