Thanks to the Visegrad Fund and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, we are now able to present this handbook focused on the impact of documentary film festivals. The result is based on cooperation with four festivals: CinéDOC-Tbilisi, DocuDays UA, Verzio Film Festival and Watch Docs, who have been our partners in this two-year project and who have contributed valuable inputs and ideas to this hand book.
The aim of this handbook is to introduce ways in which film festivals can tackle social impact and how teams of organisers from different festivals approach it. At One World we have spent several years thinking about and experimenting with ways to combine the usual festival programme and impact activities. Each year we try to improve, testing new strategies to inform our audience about how they can take action. With this handbook we want to share our experience and those of other festivals to hopefully inspire others, whether to engage in concrete impact activities or to start thinking about impact in festival work in general. Besides from these hopefully inspirational experiences, you may find information on the impact evaluation we carried out during One World 2018. The evaluation among other outcomes offers valuable knowledge on the forms of impact a documentary can have on the audience.