A Year of Distanced Views

In a time when the output of documentary film festivals has been brimming over with films on Iraqi war, the Documentary Film Festival (FDF) has naturally been unable to sidestep this burning and topical issue. Many works favour the directness, communicativeness and the brutality of Middle East images, our alternative, though, has been a slightly more distanced view: View from a Grain of Sand, an investigation into the Near East crisis as seen through the eyes of three Afghan women from different generations, and War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, in which the authors analyse the history of media manipulations by the American political elite and justifications of diverse military operations. Also in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the main, FDF will this year afford an ample share of "distanced views". Namely, we are hosting various directors whose film credos or documentary techniques are based on discreteness, non-interference, as well as absence of commentary or evaluation. The principle of the so-called fly-on-a-wall has, within the last forty years, been honed by the American documentary film titan Frederick Wiseman, whose State Legislature captures with all due precision and forbearance the "shaping and upholding of democracy" in the American Senate in the State of Iowa.

French cineaste Nicolas Philibert, this year presented in a retrospective, has employed a filmmaking principle similar to Wiseman’s. Both masters do not only share the unobtrusive "fly-on-a-wall” principle, but also an interest in institutions, with the important difference that Wiseman usually probes the entrails of the system and their role in a wider political context, while Philibert delves into the backdrop of the functioning of the institution/system and the people within it, spotlighting them without exception (Philibert: "Documentaries needn’t have a didactic note, but can express emotions and tell stories."). His films can be set in the Paris Louvre Museum (La Ville Louvre), where the director voices no concern over the museum splendour or displayed exhibits, but becomes involved in the process of exhibition setup and the people who take part in it. He takes great interest in the preparations for the play in a psychiatric institution, but not the play itself (La Moindre des choses). He is curious about the minute renovation of the taxidermied animals, but not the announced exposition (Un Animal, des animaux). He investigates the teaching approach in a provincial primary school and the teacher’s interaction with the students, but evinces no interest in how well the students do at school, etc.

The selected topic is all the more directly straddled by the films from the Workingman's Death thematic section. Last year, FDF screened Glawogger’s eponymous film (Workingman's Death), while this year the labour exploitation issue will be explored in six selected films which temporally and geostrategically cover the last 150 years of the labour movement, from the USA, South America and Europe to the Far East. 
Also featured will be some of the behemoths of contemporary documentary film: Frederick Wiseman (State Legislature), justifiably pronounced to be one of the greatest still living American filmmakers; Julien Temple (Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten) constitutes the essence of the music documentary of the last thirty years, the ever-popular subgenre, which Grant Gee (Joy Division) has only just begun to confront. In the 1970’s, Carmen Castillo (Calle Santa Fe) was actively involved in the revolutionary anti-Pinochet political movement, and it was with inexhaustible patience that Philip Groening, for almost twenty years, waited for the monks’ permission to document them in his astounding Die grosse stille. Hartmut Bitomsky, a spiritual leader of the new Berlin Film School, has created one of the most lucid films of late – a film on dust, the smallest unit of matter to become a film character.

It is with special pleasure that I can welcome back to Ljubljana the star of last year’s LIFFe (Ten Skies; 13 Lakes), James Benning, who is returning with a new landscape bravura, RR, in all probability his most political and socially engaged film, yet again bestowing upon us fascinating images of monumental American scenery.