July 3, 2026

Spotlight Programme on Sophie Fiennes

The performer out there takes the risk. If the lights should go out, if the roof, the electricity, the sound fail, I can still perform and hold the audience in the dark, without any trimmings. It’s a fascinating, lonely place. 

-- Grace Jones

We are very happy to announce that our special spotlight artist this year will be filmmaker Sophie Fiennes who joins us for the 25th anniversary year at DokuFest! 

Sophie’s oeuvre, spanning 30 years, includes collaborations with the likes of director Lars von Trier; Scottish choreographer and dancer, Michael Clark; various London choirs participating in the Artangel community project; Los Angeles-based pastor Noel Jones and his congregation; philosopher Slavoj Žižek; community arts director Alain Platel and Les Ballets C de la B; German artist Anselm Kiefer; Chinese painter Liu Xiaodong; singer-songwriter Grace Jones; Stopgap Dance Company; actor Ralph Fiennes; and, Cheek by Jowl’s acting method for making great theatre. Sophie says that this kind of devotion to process and performance – themes that span her entire body of work – comes out of doubt. “Doubt is something that people are very uncomfortable with. People want certainty. But as an artist, you have to exist in a lot of doubt to be able to be open. It is doubt that is part of faith.”

In terms of the longevity of her career working on large-scale cinema pieces, she says, “I’m trying to re-use time in filmmaking to create a different kind of knowing, which is experiential rather than informational, always working with cognition and response in a way that’s got more potential for new thought, new awakening, new realisation, new learning, an intensity of feeling – you’re pinched, or touched or wounded by that new realisation. …You feel all these strange things about life. It becomes alchemical.”

In this year’s special spotlight programme, curated and presented by our own long-time DokuFest collaborator Pamela Cohn, we’ll be showcasing six of her films: Hoover Street Revival (2003), a film that has not played publicly since its release year. Sophie feels that this film is such a foundational film in her work. “So much of what came after was possible because of that film.” Then there is The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), the first in a planned trilogy of encounters with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek wherein the two cinephiles explore and analyze cinema through a psychoanalytic lens, troubling the questions of how cinema can shape human desire and ideology. This first film, playing at DokuFest for the first time, explores the relationship between the unconscious mind and movies, covering works by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. 

Then, two amazingly alive and vibrant dance films, made in different decades, will play together: Vspres Show and Tell from 2007 featuring Alain Platel and Les Ballets C de la B’s production of VSPRES, followed by 2019’s Artificial Things, Stopgap’s disabled and non-disabled dance company performance film. Also featured is Sophie’s astonishing 2010 portrait, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, wherein she magnificently documents artist Anselm Kiefer in the midst of creating and building his 100-acre studio estate in the village of Barjac in the south of France. And lastly, Bloodlight and Bami, a scintillating and über-intimate portrait from 2017 with Jamaican singer / songwriter, the great Grace Jones – whose brother Noel Jones is at the center of Hoover Street Revival. One thing leads to another.

Sophie will be joining us at the festival this year to greet audiences and will be in conversation with Pamela to share her ongoing passions, thoughts on sustaining a long-term devotional artistic life, and her unending excitement about finding new ways to participate in the world. 

Don’t miss these hard-to-see exhilarating film works in Prizren!

***

Featured: 

Hoover Street Revival, 2003, 100’

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, 2006, 150’

Vspres Show and Tell, 2007, 72’, playing with Artificial Things, 2019, 25’

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, 2010, 105’

Grace Jones Bloodlight and Bami, 2017, 120’