This year’s Inspiration Forum will focus on the things that shape our world inconspicuously yet profoundly. Who decides what is visible and what remains hidden? Why can a single joke or a few lines sometimes capture reality better than a lengthy debate? Where does power hide in everyday life, and how does it change when it becomes part of institutions? And if today’s world is not the only possible arrangement, what other forms of collective life can we imagine?
“We don’t want to look at the world as if it were a film playing out in front of us while we simply wait to see how it ends. We want to ask what kind of world we humans are creating, what image of it we are constructing, where power actually lies within it, how we can endure this era at all—perhaps with the help of humour—and whether we can still steer the world somewhere other than where it is heading today,” says Tereza Swadoschová, head of the Inspiration Forum.
24 October – Prisoners of Geography. Who Draws the Borders of Reality?
Maps depict the world, but they also dictate what we see within it and what remains hidden. Who at present is drawing the boundaries of the reality we live in? From the Mercator projection and African borders to digital maps and algorithms, the forum will explore how space is represented, divided, and controlled.
Architect and multimedia researcher Samaneh Moafi of Forensic Architecture uses satellite imagery, videos, testimonies, spatial data, and 3D models to reconstruct events whose course is disputed or concealed. In Jihlava, she will present, among other things, a reconstruction of the attack on a school in Minab, Iran, and the case of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza. She will show that a map need not merely be a tool for describing the world, but can also reveal its true shape.
25 October – Who Has the Last Laugh? Humour as a Serious Matter
Humour has the power to turn the world we take for granted upside down, but it can just as easily do harm and strengthen power. What makes us laugh in today’s age and why? And when can laughter reveal things to us that were meant to stay hidden?
Scottish climate researcher, political economist, and comedian Matt Winning has spent the past eighteen years working on climate policy while also performing stand-up about the climate crisis. In his show Solastalgia, which he will bring to Jihlava, he connects fatherhood and fear for the future of his own children in a world driven towards inevitable destruction by fossil-fuel wealth, the oil industry, and financial power. In his hands, humour becomes a way of talking about uncertainty and fear of the future without losing the ability to name their causes. The Inspiration Forum will not only ask what we laugh at, but why humour can sometimes say things about the world that serious language cannot.
Previously announced artist Dan Perjovschi, meanwhile, can capture in a few lines a political situation that might otherwise require a lengthy debate.
30 October – The Anatomy of Power. The Collapse and Treatment of an Organism
Power is so deeply concealed in rules and institutions that we cease to notice it. How can we heal a society in which the most powerful individuals don’t have to break the rules because they themselves are creating them?
Political theorist Camila Vergara examines what happens to democracy when economic and political power becomes concentrated without restraint. Her talk will raise the question of how systemic capture of institutions can be limited, and what greater democratic control and a more equitable distribution of political power might look like.
31 October – Prospects for Change. Forever — Except Not Quite
History shows us that the world has never been complete. Yet today’s world seems to be the best and only one possible. Do we have the power merely to choose from the options offered to us, or can we create completely new ones?
David Wengrow, Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London and co-author of the international bestseller The Dawn of Everything, turns to history to challenge the idea that today’s social order is inevitable. His work shows that people in different periods experimented with radically different forms of government, ownership, freedom, and collective life. In his account, the past does not prove that the world is immutable; on the contrary, it reminds us that the world has never actually been complete—and that now it is our turn.
The Inspiration Forum will take place from 23 October to 1 November 2026 as part of the 30th edition of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.
