Most films included in the New Voices in Documentary Cinema competition display a wide range of participatory approaches and formats, with the filmmakers actively placing themselves within the worlds they present.
Thematically, One Mother, The Mountains and A Holy Family touch on the complexities of dysfunctional family dynamics, either by pointing out how these dynamics shape our identity or by framing cinema as a tool to save relationships. Identity is also seen in connection to violence and abuse, an issue approached with empathy in Light Falls Vertical and ANQA, films which highlight the value of confessions in the protagonists’ struggle to free themselves from trauma.
As platforms for social change, the documentaries Between Revolutions and The Mother of All Lies skillfully draw parallels between individual and collective histories and ways of representing the past. Within a humanist-modernist framework, Adieu Sauvage mindfully brings to the fore the invisible wounds left behind by colonialism, while the camp docu-fictional essay Orlando, My Political Biography attempts a polyphonic Postmodernist rewriting of being transsexual and non-binary.
These films employ a wide range of tropes and techniques (interviews, archives, dioramas, letters, psychodrama), but they adhere nonetheless to laws of representing reality. Knit’s Island, on the other hand, takes things a bit further and prompts us to reimagine the possibilities of documentary cinema in simulated environments and to reflect on how blurry the boundary separating the real and the virtual can be.