The next phase of ESoDoc 2025 takes place from August 28 to October 4 (online) and from October 10 to 17 in Vilnius, in partnership with the Human Rights Film Festival and Inconvenient Films.
Thanks to our partnership, we have selected 2 filmmakers who will join the whole phase, culminating with the public pitch that will take place in Vilnius on October 15 and 16. Here are the two selected professionals and their projects.
Anna Burdina - Ukraine
Anna Burdina is producer, сulture manager, over 15 years has organized film festivals and film industrial events in Ukraine, Finland and Lithuania. Her experience extends to film production, and the project, she brings a wealth of industry knowledge, social connections, and on-set experience.
Night Mayor
Without citizenship but full of hope, Chad is a migrant and the Night Mayor of a Ukrainian city at war. Amid sirens, darkness, and loss, he creates spaces for the celebration of life.
Gailė Garnelytė - Lithuania
Gailė Garnelytė is Lithuanian filmmaker and script writer based in Vilnius. She has been working with films as director and scriptwriter since 2013. Also since 2017 working actively as script writing consultant, lecturer and creating script writing workshops. Feature documentary “Final destination” (dir. R. Marcinkus, 2013) where she was script cosultant and story editor won the best student film award at IDFA (2023).
Her first self directed short documentary film “The Robot and the Butterfly” was screened at 30+ film festivals and won 2 awards as the best documentary short film.
Currently she is finishing to direct a feature documentary film “In Passing” (prod. Akvilė Žilionytė, Artišokai, 2025). The project was presented at Luebeck Film Days “FUTURE NORTH” programme (2024) and Beldocs Pitching Forum 2025 where it won distribution award by Institute of Documentary Film (Czech Republic).
RITA
Rita is doing everything to be a good mother but poverty and disability make it extremely difficult.