Founded in 2006, it is the oldest international documentary film festival in the Baltic States and the only festival in Lithuania dedicated exclusively to creative documentaries.
The VDFF annually presents 5-7 documentary programmes, with a total of about 30 long and short films. The main programme consists of films from recent years that have been screened at the most important documentary festivals (Berlin, Amsterdam (IDFA), Visions du Réel, Cinema du Reel). This programme presents not only the latest works by the masters of documentary, but also the brightest new voices in documentary.
The parallel programmes of the festival are dedicated to retrospectives of authors, a look at classic documentaries, undiscovered filmmakers and the themes of the day. Every year, the festival presents Lithuanian documentary premieres and a retrospective programme dedicated to Lithuanian or Baltic documentaries.
We are constantly following developments and news in the field of documentary cinema, discussing the position of documentaries in the context of Lithuanian film festivals, and rethinking the role of the VDFF. Since 2019, we have included a virtual reality film programme, which has attracted a lot of interest.
VDFF is also a meeting space. During the festival, screenings are accompanied by talks with filmmakers, presentations by film critics, filmmakers' representatives or creative experts. Since its inception, the festival has already been visited by many filmmakers, artists and film heroes: Eitvydas Doškus, Antanas Mockus, Agnė Marcinkevičiūtė, Darius Žiūra, Jurgis Matulevičius, Mindaugas Survila, Audrius Stonys, Fern Silva, Cynthia Beatt, Colin McCabe, Miroslav Janek, Pip Chodorov, Kim Hopkins, Jeffrey Perkins, Peter Sempel, Nicolas Philibert, Pawel Lozinski, Sergej Dvortsevoy, Viktor Kossakovsky, Leonard Retel Helmrich and others.
From 2021. Since 2021, the VDFF has been participating in the "Young Programmers" initiative of the Art Hive and the international project Moving Cinema, in which students learn about the main stages of organising a film festival and present their own programme to the audience.
Every year, the team of programmers is complemented by fellow curators and academics who are passionate about the field of documentary filmmaking, and in cooperation with organisations from other artistic fields. The VDFF has already initiated and curated programmes with: co-founder of the early film festival "First Wave", film archivist and curator Aleksas Gilaitis, director Lina Lužytė, political philosopher Egidijus Mardos, film scholar Anna Mikonis-Railienė, and others.
