Iconic Shots and Intimate Revelations

German film critic Achim Forst reflects on the boundaries between documentary authenticity and cinematic staging at Flahertiana, exploring unforgettable images, intimate revelations and the ethics of filming private lives.

Only a few films you see at a festival contain iconic images or shots that the viewer won’t forget for a long time and that perfectly represent the whole cinematic work. In Sing Me a Song by Thomas Balmès, it is the indoor tracking shot of Buddhist monks in a mountain monastery in Bhutan. From a close-up of a constantly bowing teenage Buddhist monk, the camera draws back, hovering above a long table and revealing a whole group of young monks bowing and loudly praying. They sit close to each other in front of written documents, each looking down at his smartphone, scrolling through picture galleries or playing video games while chanting their prayers (“Your power conquers the whole host of evils, Lord of Lords!”).

In his beautifully shot and edited long-term portrait, French director Thomas Balmès tells the story of Peyangki, a boy who came to the monastery as a little child, destined to become an important priest. Ten years later, the young Peyangki sets out for the city in order to meet a girlfriend he met in a chat group. He finds out that she is already a mother, demanding things from life that he can’t provide.

With its visual beauty and cinematic craftsmanship in editing and storytelling, the film – like a couple of others in this year’s Flahertiana festival programme – raises general questions about authenticity in today’s documentary filmmaking. Sing Me a Song sometimes sweeps the viewer away with poignant sequences and wonderfully photographed panning shots, some of them more reminiscent of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor than of any documentary. In other sequences, you feel even more as though you are watching a fiction film because you can hardly believe that, for instance, these two young monks are speaking about their most existential problems (whether to remain at or leave the monastery) in front of a moving movie camera. But hey, why not, considering all those millions of users confiding their most private issues to the public via their Facebook or Instagram accounts.

While Sing Me a Song shows the transformations the internet and social media have been generating in a formerly remote Asian country and society, Jawline by Liza Mandelup gives an insightful and multifaceted account of social media in the U.S., which also applies to European societies. The film’s protagonists are masters of generating public attention, the successful ones making their living from the click rates of their social media accounts. And, of course, with every move in front of the camera, these influencers tried to use the filmmaker as a tool for promoting their Instagram or TikTok accounts. However, the young, clever and experienced American director Liza Mandelup worked with these talents, a few social media stars and their manager in L.A., and the good-looking but still struggling 16-year-old aspiring influencer Austyn in rural Tennessee. The result is a collection of funny and bitter stories in an entertaining documentary that earned Mandelup the Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at Sundance.

That not only youngsters are ready for nearly unlimited forthrightness is demonstrated by the strong and mesmerising 70-year-old Polish lady in Lessons of Love (Lekcja miłości) by Małgorzata Goliszewska and Kasia Mateja. Like an actress, Jola tells her friends and the camera about the lost decades of her life at the side of a husband she doesn’t love, with whom she cannot communicate, who never showed her empathy and never gave her any sexual pleasure. Consequently, she starts an affair with a man who can fulfil her needs, mostly accompanied by the camera.

The film was one of a number of interesting Polish productions in this year’s Flahertiana International Competition. The two directors shot Lessons of Love as a sort of fiction documentary in which you wonder about Jola’s frankness even less than about her aged lover, who is like an extra in her story but is nevertheless willing to be filmed in very intimate situations.

This surprising openness applies just as well to Bitter Love by Jerzy Sladkowski. The Swedish-Finnish-Polish co-production by a Polish director living in Sweden, about a Russian Volga cruise, is an example of today’s transboundary documentary filmmaking in Europe. Jerzy Sladkowski gathered a group of young to middle-aged protagonists with strong feelings and desires, most of them longing for happiness with a new partner they hope to find on the river cruise.

We watch and listen, flabbergasted, to the intimate stories of (among others) two lonely women of different generations, a disenchanted Russian bard and a weird couple who for many years couldn’t sort out their feelings before the marriage desired by both.

And we ask ourselves: Is this authentic? And: How much of this is staged? When the bard tears up photos of his ex-wife in front of his new female acquaintance, we see this moment edited like a fiction film, shot twice or with two cameras.

The filmmaker reassured the festival selection team that everything was shot without staging, only selected from a huge amount of material. Flahertiana’s attitude: The main point is how convincing and believable the film and its characters are.

I agree, but found two more traditional Flahertiana documentaries and their protagonists more convincing: In his masterfully shot and edited Merry Christmas, Yiwu, Serbian filmmaker Mladen Kovačević introduces workers in the Chinese city of Yiwu, where 600 factories produce our Western Christmas decorations. The respect and distance in this film evoked more empathy in me for these people than all the intensely private revelations in Bitter Love.

Moving and touching in a very different way is Butterfly’s Dream (Efekt motylka) by Jarosław Szmidt. In a sometimes reportage-like style, Jarosław Szmidt introduces the viewer to little Zuzia, a brave girl with an extraordinary personality. Like an additional family member, the Polish director filmed the fabulous Zuzia, her parents and her sister for a couple of years, all battling against Zuzia’s severe and painful skin disease. Fortunately, they eventually succeeded – you couldn’t stand the film otherwise.

Achim Forst
© FIPRESCI 2026