The Barcelona International Documentary Film Festival continues to exhibit, and now in its 27th edition, the most authentic and committed proposals of a genre that “has always been a laboratory of experimentation, both at a formal level and for the exploration of themes and content,” he comments. Anna Petrus, artistic director of DocsBarcelona, ??told this newspaper. Agent of happiness, a film that questions Bhutan’s label as the happiest country on the planet, opens today an event that will last until May 12 with a program made up of 40 feature films and 10 shorts with the CCCB and the Renoir Floridablanca Cinemas as headquarters, and with the Filmin platform as a virtual window.
For Petrus, the importance of the documentary is fundamental because “it allows us to introduce ourselves to complex realities” and maintains that “the platforms play an important role in reaching the public”, but warns that this genre “continues to need private financing so that the creators and creators immerse themselves in the complexity of this reality freely.” He considers that currently the documentary “is aligned with all the issues on the public agenda and thus in this year’s edition we will see stories about female empowerment, AI and new technologies and a great topic about colonialisms that has to do with power relations and how history has been explained.”
In this edition of Docs there are a total of ten works that address this last topic and “reflect the violence left by the Europeans and also warn about the great more contemporary colonialisms such as the great Chinese economic giant and its influence on Asia.”
The contest has renewed its structure this year. From now on Docs
The perspective of women fighters regarding the consequences of colonialism can be seen in films such as Mambar Pierrette, by Rosine Mbakam, or Daughter of Genghis, by the Danes Kristoffer Juel Poulsen and Christian Als, a story that delves into the life of the leader of the Mongolian ultranationalist organization Gerel Khas, which aims to cleanse Mongolia of corruption and Chinese oppression.
The new Docs section
One of the highlights of this edition will be the visit of the Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky, who returns to the festival to present his new work. Architecton, premiered at the last Berlinale, is a poetic meditation on architecture that warns about the devastating impact of cement.
Another important visit will be that of the prestigious tandem formed by the French documentary filmmakers Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret, who will receive the Docs de Honor award and will star in a meeting and a retrospective in collaboration with the Filmoteca.
On the other hand, John Wilson, who will give a master class on his series How to with John Wilson, and the Catalan director Albert Serra, who will talk about his documentary on bullfighting Afternoons of Solitude, will be the main attractions of DocsBarcelona Industry, the section of industry directed by Èric Motjer that will be deployed from May 6 to 10.
Motjer explains that this year’s programming is “a window to the world we are, and to the world to come.” And regarding the future of the sector, he highlights that, in addition to AI, “there are a series of technologies such as virtual reality or augmented reality that are having a significant impact on documentary production”, technologies and projects in which it will be necessary to find some distribution and financing windows. “At DocsBarcelona we will facilitate, above all, the professional part to become a space for meeting and debate about where the sector is heading in this sense and we will do so under the umbrella of the brand that we have created I Docs, which will house all these projects that They explore new technologies with their own documentary production,” he concludes.
