The Invisible Audience: Measuring Documentary Circulation Beyond the Box Office
Presented in partnership with Doc Alliance
European documentary production continues to grow, even as public funding for creative documentaries and documentary festivals comes under increasing pressure. According to the European Audiovisual Observatory, feature documentary production in Europe rose from an annual average of 827 films between 2017 and 2019 to a provisional 1,018 in 2025. Yet few documentaries receive sustained theatrical distribution, and for many films, festivals have become the principal route to audiences. A documentary may screen at forty or fifty festivals and reach thousands of viewers, but those admissions remain dispersed across the statistics of individual events and are largely absent from the figures funders use to assess public value. This panel examines how festivals, networks, sales agents, and platforms might document circulation more systematically. Could the sector agree on shared standards for recording screenings, admissions, territories, online views, and educational programmes? How can quantitative data be combined with evidence of cultural and social impact without reducing documentary cinema to a single metric? By making festival and non-theatrical audiences more visible, the sector could strengthen its case for public support and improve cross-border circulation.
SPEAKERS
Marek Hovorka
CEO, Ji.hlava IDFF (CZ)
Hanne Biermann
Festivals & Marketing Manager, Film Harbour (DE)
Mita Suri Film Programme Manager, Sheffield Docs (UK)
Dimitra Kouzi
Director, Kouzi Productions (GR)
MODERATED BY
Maša Marković
Head of Industry, Sarajevo Film Festival (BA)
TIME
August 17th, 2026
12:00 – 13:00 (CET)
LOCATION
Festival Garden
Marek Hovorka
Founder of Ji.hlava IDFF in 1997 and its Festival Director since then. Between 1998 – 2005 studied at the Department of Documentary Film at Prague’s FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy Of Performing Arts). Co-founder of Doc Alliance festival network, East Silver documnetary film market, DAFilms on-line distribution platfrom and founder of various Industry initiatives (Inspiration Forum, Emerging Producers, Festival Identity). Member of editor´s board of Dok.revue and revue “do”. Member of various juries at international and documentary film festivals (f. e. FID Marseille, CPH:DOX, Visions du reel, Karlovy Vary IFF, Cinema Verite Tehran, It´s all true Sao Paulo).
Hanne Biermann
Hanne Biermann began her career as an apprentice at the renowned German publishing house Suhrkamp before earning a degree in media studies from the Bauhaus University Weimar. She then moved into the film industry, working for DOK Leipzig and in art-house cinema.
Since 2019, she has been a festivals and marketing manager in international documentary sales. Her work regularly takes her to festivals and markets around the world. She is an alum of the Locarno-Thessaloniki Industry Academy and Berlinale Talents, and has been a member of the European Film Academy since 2024.
Mita Suri
Mita supervises the delivery and is part of the curatorial team of the Sheffield DocFest Film Programme, including all the screenings and associated events. She runs the annual Youth Jury programme and year round traineeships, as well as programming year-round activity and screenings outside of the festival.
Dimitra Kouzi
Dimitra Kouzi is a creative producer, director, audience developer and journalist with a multicultural background and an international approach to storytelling. She has worked on more than 50 films, including Alice On & Off, La Chana, Communion, Radiograph of a Family, Child of Dust and Amílcar. Her second feature documentary, Connecting with Mit(working title), is in development as a French co-production with Little Big Story.
Drawing on her experience in journalism and documentary commissioning with ERT, ARTE, ZDF and ERT Digital, she supports filmmakers in audience design and pitch preparation. She also teaches speaks and mentors internationally. She holds an MA in Media and Communication from LMU Munich, studied photography at Photo Circle in Athens and is a EURODOC alumna. She works in English, Greek and German.
Maša Marković
MAŠA MARKOVIĆ is Head of Industry at the Sarajevo Film Festival since 2022. A graduate of Charles University in Prague, she has held key roles at CineLink for over a decade, contributing to the development of CineLink Industry Days into a major platform for co-production, professional training, and cross-sector exchange in Southeast Europe. Her previous experience includes coordination of the Ex Oriente Film (Institute of Documentary Film in Prague) and she has served as a matchmaker for various European market platforms.
From 2017 to 2025, she curated Dealing with the Past, a non-competition section of the Sarajevo Film Festival, and since 2019, has led the Human Rights Day programme. Both strands use film as a tool for dialogue and youth-driven social engagement and have led to the launch of several initiatives combining film, education, and civic participation. Since 2021, she has also overseen the Network of Festivals in the Adriatic Region, a collaborative initiative that connects seven regional festivals with the goal of fostering shared programming strategies, joint audience development activities, sustainability practices, enhanced regional visibility, and strengthened festival professionalism across Southeast Europe.