MoMI and the Polish Cultural Institute New York is pleased to partner with the Polish documentary festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity on presenting We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat: A conversation about the art (and process) of connecting films with their audiences between Senior Curator of Film Eric Hynes and Karol Piekarczyk, the artistic director of Millennium Docs Against Gravity.

The biggest documentary film festival in Poland, MDAG is the only festival in Europe to take place simultaneously in seven cities throughout the same country. Karol Piekarczyk also oversees Against Gravity, a key player in arthouse film distribution.

Full Program

12:00–3:30 PM Reverse Shot Emerging Critics Workshop (PRIVATE) 

12:30–1:15 PM “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat”: A conversation about the art (and process) of connecting films with their audiences between Senior Curator of Film Eric Hynes and Karol Piekarczyk, the artistic director of Millennium Docs Against Gravity. The biggest documentary film festival in Poland, MDAG is the only festival in Europe to take place simultaneously in seven cities throughout the same country. Karol also oversees Against Gravity, a key player in arthouse film distribution.  (Redstone Theater) 

1:00–2:30 PM Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Filmmaker Michael Coleman presents an edit under construction, along with sample scenes, from his debut feature documentary Satan’s Greatest Lies. What began as a document of George Haw Russell’s decades-long fight to preserve East Texas’ disappearing wilderness transforms into an intimate study of a man grappling with purpose, loss, and the weight of legacy. This screening presents the first half of the film alongside newly captured material, revealing how their growing trust exposes deeper emotional truths—both about George’s unraveling world and the filmmaker’s shifting role within it. (Bartos Screening Room) 

1:30–3:00 PM Multimedia performance and discussion: Filmmaker Argyro Nicolaou presents Unsettled, a multimedia lecture performance and work-in-progress feature that explores the fast-changing landscapes of an island under occupation and the filmmaker’s attempts to reconstruct her mother’s past. (Redstone Theater) 

3:00–5:30 PM Work-in-progress session: shorts from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. Moderated by First Look Senior Programmer Edo Choi. (Bartos Screening Room) 

3:15–5:30 PM Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Amelia Evans presents a cut of her feature-length documentary Minor Attraction, an attempt to craft empathetic portraits of three people who acknowledge they have pedophilic desires but who claim never to have sexually interacted with a child—and who each want more support to keep it that way. What emerges is an intimate exploration into shame and loneliness, the limits of empathy, and the cost of our collective silence around desire, pleasure, and the body. (Redstone Theater) 

Millennium Docs Against Gravity 2025

The 22nd Millennium Docs Against Gravity will take place from May 9th to 18th in seven Polish cities, followed by an online event from May 20th to June 2nd, 2025. The 22nd edition of MDAG will be an opportunity to meet with numerous prominent figures from the world of documentary cinema. The festival once again will host filmmakers and film protagonists from various corners of the globe, creating a remarkable occasion for personal conversations and exchange of ideas. The 21st edition of the festival in 2024 gathered an audience of over 165,000 people. As the only film festival in Europe, it takes place simultaneously in 7 cities: Warsaw, Wrocław, Gdynia, Poznań, Katowice, Bydgoszcz, and Łódź.

In 2022, Millennium Docs Against Gravity was admitted to the European Film Academy as one of the “most important European film festivals,” gaining the opportunity to qualify films for the European Film Award. In 2024, MDAG was included on the prestigious list of the Oscar® Qualifying Festivals in Feature Documentary Film category.

MDAG is also a co-founder and member of the Doc Alliance, which brings together seven key European documentary film festivals: CPH: DOX Copenhagen, DOK Leipzig, IDFF Jihlava, FID Marseille, Visions du Réel Nyon, Doclisboa, and Millennium Docs Against Gravity.

Karol Piekarczyk is the Artistic Director of Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland. With audiences of over 160 000 it is one of the most popular documentary film festivals in the world. For over 15 years he has been working with documentary films and film festivals. He graduated from the University of Glasgow with a Master’s Degree, with distinction, in Film & TV Studies and in Sociology. Previously he worked with the WATCH DOCS festival in Warsaw, and he was the Artistic Director of the Document Festival in Glasgow. Currently, apart from being the Artistic Director at Millennium Docs Against Gravity, he also oversees film distribution, being responsible for releasing in the last few years over 35 documentary films in cinemas. He has been a member of juries and a consultant on numerous documentary productions. He is a member of the European Film Academy.

This program is a collaboration between MoMI’s First Look Festival and Polish documentary festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity, with MDAG’s Artistic Director Karol Piekarczyk talking about selection from their Warsaw showcase and engaging in the Working on It sessions.