BIDF EXTRA – for documentary lovers

Posted by Edith Károly-Rajki | Mar 12, 2021 | filming, industry

The 10th March was the official end of the 7th Budapest International Documentary Festival, but the organizers decided to extend it.

There was a huge interest for the fresh, international, all-night-long creative documentaries. All of it was despite or even because of the pandemic, entirely online. Because of the huge success this year there is the BIDF EXTRA, but this is unusual that it comes right after the festival.

“We organize BIDF EXTRA every year. When we’re in the cinema then the most successful movies are repeated to get even more viewers, these are usually half the films we have.” – comment Ágnes Sós the founder of the BIDF.

“The distributors and the platform also allow us to extend the festival. Most of the films have not yet reached the maximum counts, many more people can watch them. The other reason why we continued the festival, is that we have the 3 day bank holiday, and people now should stay at home, and watch high quality films.”

Ágnes Sós

Ágnes Sós also mentioned the most viewed films, but she underlined that there are even greater movies that should be highlighted. “We have brilliant movies that I personally highly recommend like “Ringside”, which is about two talented boxers. Award-winning films are also watched better. “Run like a girl” is also a very good documentary – it tells the story of a Kenyan marathon runner. Or the film “Reunited” shows the drama of a torn family and was made by one of the best Danish directors in the world. The jury and the audience thinks differently of what makes up a good film. We sometimes wonder what the jury and the audience think is good, and of course there are plenty of other aspects.”

The most viewed films on the festival are the “Gorbachev.Heaven”, “Born in Auschwitz” and the “Caught in the net”.

In this BIDF EXTRA you can reach all the 30 competition films until midnight, March 15th. The highly successful studio conversations also had a positive response, and are still available. All can be viewed on the BIDF website as well as on the YouTube channel.