The latest edition of the Documentary Film Festival has faced us with the formidable challenge to combine different ambitions, approaches and trends of contemporary documentary production. We have threaded stories from entirely different environments as well as various historical and political backgrounds that share only the independent and autonomous wish to observe and comment on the state of affairs around us, around them.
This year's films on artists and arts have been entitled The Making of. We find this title more appropriate since all these films deal with a certain production process of visual, music, or dance creations in a very direct, almost self-reflective manner...
Traditionally, the second section addresses several burning issues of contemporary society, the topical cultural cleft of the globalised world that, paradoxically, united us in the desire for a handsome profit and separated us culturally, if not everywhere and entirely, then at least too often, and in too many ways.
The embodiment of the finest human spirit that aims for a more tolerant and open world, film festivals are making a desperate attempt at having a fruitful dialogue my means of the filmic images of the world. But how can one comment on the fact that the truest stories are the imaginary ones that tackle the truth. What we can say, though, is that you are invited to attend the discussion on the above issue, the issue of exploring the border between the fictional and documentary. It’s not as if we were the first to ponder on these questions, but it had been done at another time and in other films. Now that Berlin showed The Road to Guantanamo by Michael Winterbottom on one hand and Offside by Jafar Panahi on the other, that same question has acquired a different tinge!
Jelka Stergel
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