Each year, Cinéma du réel ponders upon the state of the documentary, its forms, its developments and the approaches of its filmmakers. This is what lends the festival its exploratory side, makes it an ongoing research project. In addition to the screening of this flourishing contemporary internatioanal documentary cinema, Cinéma du réel invites us to experience the world and cinema through a plethora of gazes on the world, a plurality of documentary practices and visions other than our own.
Because cinema passes from the filmmaker’s mind to the mind of the spectator, it is an art of connivance, even collusion, between filmmaker and spectator, who experiences another imaginary, a universe other than his or her own. But this experience – which is also that of the other or rather the distance separating him or her from me – is singular inasmuch as it also reminds us that we all inhabit the same world.
A world to watch without being blinded by the continuous flow of events.
And it is perhaps through films that disturb, upend imaginaries, confront other desires, other aspirations, other dreams, that a discontinuity occurs in the inexorable unfolding of real-world events. This discontinuity, which questions, surprises, resists, delights, is what helps us to avoid being blinded and to look at our contemporaries. This is our invitation to the audiences of Cinéma du réel.
Catherine Bizern
THE GAME OF TRUTHS
The question of truth is core to the history of documentary forms, at least since Dziga Vertov made the “kino-pravda” into a tool for mechanically and authentically observing the world, and before his terminology inspired the project of Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch for a “cinéma-vérité” that espouses human subjectivities up close. The quest is even more pivotal, and in an entirely different register, now that the document – visual more than audio – is called on as “irrefutable evidence” supporting a media and legal rhetoric.
Architects, authors, filmmakers, theatre directors and researchers are invited to this third edition of Festival Conversations to question the value of truth that is ascribed to the documentary. Their approaches based on surveys, archive material and testimonies, all develop complex thinking on truth – not as knowledge and expertise but as a shared and open horizon, welcoming uncertainties, grey areas, and sometimes also silence. This documentary art facing the battle of truths will be queried on its relationship to evidence and testimony in a first round table on the role of the document in the legal, historical or political rhetoric on truth. A second round table will focus on the detours of the documentary via stories, re-enactments or fictions that open up myriad bypaths towards as many singular truths.
Alice Leroy