‘A conversation cannot belong to one person the way a narrative can. It is one thing after another, a series of events and relationships and words between those conversing and all those listening [….] Conversation addresses the ‘free stranger’ in any interlocutor’
Any public forum should be a critical space where the interlocutor is asked what is its role in shaping thoughts, politics, and opinions. This applies crucially to documentary film when increasingly the moving image is becoming the dominant means by which information is analysed, created, and disseminated. Increasingly, we gain ‘insight’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘values’ through the images displayed on a cinema, TV, or computer screen.
Documentary film straddles the worlds of reportage, anthropology, activism, photography and mass entertainment. The films are provocations to the spoken and written word, to our ability to frame and answer questions that lead directly to our capacity to shape and question the world we live in.
What are the intentions of the filmmaker, the system of production that gives rise to the film, the position of the subject, and how, we, the audience consume it?
The responsibility of filmmakers towards their subject is often talked about – quite rightly, there are ethical and moral dimensions in claiming and representing slices of reality, intimate lives and moments, or broad historical subjects. But, there is also a responsibility on us as an audience. We cannot be passive, or uncritical in the reading of a film. And this responsibility to be active in our appreciation of the films is even more important today when documentary films are powerful providers of knowledge and opinion, with the potential to inspire direct action. A film is always both pretext and context for discussion. Always entertaining, moving, and provocative, our encounter with the images is an opportunity to go beyond the films themselves and escape the, all too common, sense that there is nothing anyone can do about anything.
If documentary films are so welcome today it is because they prepare a route that leads from empathy, to insight, to action. Empathy and compassion are everything, and at the same time nothing if they remain merely an emotional state, however powerful. Documentary films are also an antidote to the trivialising and closed public discourse we are too often surrounded by. In these films complex realities are allowed to remain complex – rhetoric and slogans are avoided and conclusions open ended. It is for us to work out our own conclusions, to revel in this complexity rather than be oppressed by it. The stories we tell and the stories we choose not to tell say a great deal about our assumptions, often naive, about ourselves and the world we live in.
We cannot suggest that any film, or any cultural output, is a panacea, yet it can be part of a process in which the key protagonist is the viewer, the reader, the interpreter. The film/audience relationship is at the heart of the festival. The films we show can take us by the hand and provide that rare thing: that collective moment when, with the help of others, we can see ourselves, and our relations with others, just that little bit clearer.
