Challenges and limitations of documentary film
Originally, cinema as conceived by its pioneers took the form of documentary film. This is evident in the very first films made by the Lumière brothers, who sent cameramen around the world to capture newsreels on film reels: the arrival of a train at La Ciotat station, a baby being bathed, workers leaving the Lumière factories, a few images of India, images of major capitals, etc. But very quickly, they also wanted to write fiction using this exciting tool, such as The Sprinkler Sprinkled (L’arroseur arrosé, 1896), Nero Testing Poisons on Slaves (Néron essayant des poisons sur des esclaves, 1897), and The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (L’assassinat du duc de Guise, 1897), all in the very conventional style inherited from the theater[1]. Georges Méliès, who bought the process, almost immediately abandoned the documentary use of the camera to turn to increasingly elaborate fiction. These few words are just to point out that, from the beginning, the medium of cinema wanted to show the world as it is, but the audience, during screenings in cafés or fairground booths, increasingly demanded escapism. And, besides, is it possible to remain objective when filming the world?
So how can we explain why documentary films have become so popular today, to the point where entire festivals are dedicated to them, as demonstrated most powerfully by the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), where the FIPRESCI jury screened no fewer than 13 films, not counting the other selections. Documentary cinema is therefore a thriving branch of the film industry with a real audience, as we have seen. And there are so many documentary filmmakers that it would be impossible to name them all, from Jean Rouch to Agnès Varda, Claude Lanzman, David Attenborough, Rithy Panh, Claire Simon and Frederick Wiseman. Someone once said that documentaries are “cinema of the real” so much so that a festival in Paris took its name from this phrase. But what is reality and why show it? The reasons are many and varied: to film the world, to convince others of one’s opinions, to impose a worldview, to unite, to divide, to inform, to distort, to educate, etc. It’s fair to say that there’s no shortage of opportunities to pick up a camera and that, for the past ten years or so, filmmakers of reality have turned to what are now called “scripted documentaries,” in which a story can be told in the style of Agnès Varda or Claire Denis.
But if we’re not careful, some documentaries could very quickly become filmed documents intended to show off, in a kind of sometimes naive exhibitionism: people show off their dogs, their cats, their parents, and use old VHS videos to show that time has passed. We think of Confessions of a Mole by Mo Tan, We Were Left Alone (Fomos ficando sós) by Adrián Canoura, Stories of a Lie (Ιστορίες Ενός Ψέματος) by Olia Verriopoulou, Flana by Zahraa Ghandour, and Flood by Katy Scoggin, all shown at IDFA this year. And with good reason, because these works can be considered intimate films that deal with family ties and broken or troubled lives, and they need these intimate images and this special connection with the potential viewer. The same is true of Dawood Hilmandi’s film Paikar, which won an award from the jury.
On the other hand, Amsterdam also featured directors who chose to stage a kind of scripted story that offers a different view of reality, far from narcissism or confession, but closer to an almost fictionalized narrative. Thus, the sadness of expatriates through the life of an old sanatorium (The Karlti Kingdom [Qartlis Tskhovreba] by Tamar Kalandadze and Julien Pebrel), the poetry of the endless wandering of shepherds with their flocks (The Wind Blows Whatever It Wants by Ivan Boiko), the almost Chaplinesque burlesque denouncing the absurdity of certain social conventions (32 Meters by Morteza Atabaki, dedicated to Abbas Kiarostami). In this genre, Blood Red (Západ) by Martin Imrich remains quite unclassifiable in the documentary genre because it is so well scripted, with its prologue, seven parts, and epilogue in the form of a Last Supper in homage to Béla Tarr, that it strangely resembles a fiction film.
As we can see, thanks to festivals such as the one in Amsterdam, the documentary genre has evolved so much that it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand what is at stake, but perhaps that is what makes it so powerful. As a result, only three of the thirteen films submitted for the FIPRESCI prize strictly adhere to the definition of the genre: educational films presenting authentic facts that have not been embellished for the occasion (as opposed to fiction films). These are Weeping Rocks by Karlis Bergs, which presents a nature researcher without scripting his words; The Sessions by Sien Versteyhe, a neutral and objective observation of a young abused woman filmed only from behind; and The Fly of the Stork (El vol de la cigonya) by Soumaya Hidalgo Djiahdou and Berta Vicente Salas, which shows the difficulties of a young girl torn between two religions and two civilizations. The programmers chose to focus on the various ways of filming reality, and they were right to do so.
By Jean-Max Méjean
Edited by Savina Petkova
@FIPRESCI 2025
[1] You must see Thierry Frémaux’s two films, Lumière ! L’aventure commence (Lumière! The Adventure Begins) in 2016 and Lumière ! L’aventure continue (Lumière! The Adventure Continues) in 2025.