Documentary’s effects span from long views of history to intimate life. A movie may rewrite the past through the present, or a documentary may modify perceptions of the mass media. The following soliloquies and monologues from this year’s IDFA provide a summary of documentary’s capacity, or inability, to enable change.
Over the past 10 years, more than 200,000 farmers in India have committed suicide. The current oligopolistic structure of international food trade has translated into sustained degradation of food security amongst nations, while bringing small-scale farmers to the brink of annihilation.
At a seminar at the Nordic Panorama Film Festival in Reykjavik last autumn I learned that current media developments are threatening the survival of copyright. Is this good or bad news for documentary filmmakers?
Two films – one fiction and one documentary – tell an African story from the perspective of the white people involved, who find themselves labelled as the enemy. Both films confront us with the colonial past and raise questions about the feasibility of exporting democracy and enforcing it on fundamentally different societies.
In The Player, the director portrays three gamblers: the Bookmaker, the Swindler and the Poker Player, as well as admiration and fascination for a father who lost everything and didn’t even blink.
The New Frontier programme offers both installation space and film section. The space showcases media works that straddle the boundaries between art, cinema and new technology. DOX saw two films from the programme: “Double Take” is a history lesson and a cinematic art. The brilliance of “Utopia in Four Movements” is in the truth it mines, the exploration itself; Sam Green narrates the four utopias found and lost. Our favourite at Sundance.
At the Berlinale the documentary “Black Bus” is one Israeli powerful testimony on the repressive nature of Israel.
A documentary from the time when American films portrayed Soviet commissionaires changing sides to betray communist ideals, and Soviet television showed CIA agents gunning down innocent comrades.
The downfall of the relationship between Tarkovsky’s cinematographer (DoP) and the great director stemmed mostly from the mutual acknowledgment that there was just not enough space on the set for two self-proclaimed “geniuses” to work side by side.
Daniel Ellsberg, a washington insider, decided to place himself squarely at the centre of a maelstrom that exposed devastating uS national secrets. During the Cold war another renegade, Ryszard Kuklinski, passed more than forty thousand strategic documents concerning the warsaw Pact from Poland to the American CIA. Both men changed the world.
This is the film about the rich and greedy in a united states of profit. Michael Moore himself fills nearly every screen as the people’s inquisitor.
With Rabbits à la Berlin the Polish filmmakers have managed to create something as unusual as an innocent yet challenging fable about the masses of the old East Germany: a collective forced to adapt to the uneasiness of a free world.