In the last few years, documentary film has had a clear production boom, and has earned something which it seldom or never had in precious historical periods: a market of its own, brought about by television demand. That marke represents a huge challenge, but also, first and foremost, a profound mutation concerning this area of production and distribution’s context. On the other hand, it produces new production and language patterns. Along with this market, the rules have changed, new tensions appeared. But… in view of that mutation in context, what films are actually being made?
In Serpa we wish to discuss films and their language. We wish to start from the concrete analysis of works to understand which bigger challenges for cinema and the image they present nowadays. We wish to understand which works trouble or put into question the new patterns of reading and consuming images (and) of our world. Or which works trouble us and put us into question in view of those new patterns… We do not wish to discuss documentary “in itself” but the cinema which is being made within it.
A film of several voices which, in tribute to Michel Giacometti, meets popular culture in the past and in the present, in Alentejo and Corsica, to witness a kind of exchange and sharing where nobody loses their identity or their roots, but are rather revitalized through contact with the other.
“My mother died when I was five years old. My father never talked about her. Last year, my mother’s Portuguese family found me. I travel to Portugal to meet this family that I haven’t seen for over twenty years.” – Pierre Primetens
“Beirut is a wonderful city. Here, we are at the center of the world. In Beirut, between 1975 and 1990, there was a civil war… It stopped one day, suddenly, after having infested our lives. I wanted to film the emptiness it left. ” – Danielle Arbid
In the ‘gecekondu’ neighbourhoods in the suburbs of Istanbul, a woman writes late into the night, hidden from her husband and children. During the day, she works an assortment of odd seasonal jobs to feed her family.
“For a long time, in my imagination I lived in Vietnam. Landscapes, faces, voices came to me in a veiled way, a rather unlikely buzz of images of war. Nothing could erase these timeless images in me. To a certain extent they change the way I come to see the country now.” – Daniel Nguyen Van
On October 5th, 1997, a film crew entered the favela of Vila Parque da Cidade. The inhabitants are watching the Pope on television giving mass in the city centre. In December the crew returns to the favela to find out how the inhabitants live the religious aspect of their lives.
A nomad encampment in he desert in the south of Kazakhstan. Living conditions are extremely tough for both man and beast. Occasionally, all is abandoned to the lure of the city. In any case, one cannot but think of leaving to find a little food elsewhere.
Eighty kilometres from Saint Petersburg, lies a run-down settlement. Only a handful of elderly people now lives in this remote village. Once a week, a goods wagon full of bread is unhitched from the main line train…
On the roadside, in the middle of the arid steppe of Kazakhstan, a sign reads: Moscow 2300 km. A truck-driver has added by hand: The road to hell. A bus appears in the horizon. In the bus is travelling a family. With their six children, they form a little travelling circus.
An older married couple tries to keep a nice atmosphere in their home, in spite of extraordinary conditions.
A lonely old woman tends to her chores on her farm with extreme care. In doing so she attempts to master her fairy-tale predicament.
For ten years, the mathematician Amalia Susi described the daily life in the gulag with a pencil on various pieces of clothing. Writer Andrei Sinyavski wrote many letters from the gulag to his wife.
Scenes of rural life, work in the fields, transhumance, celebrations. Bales of straw slide down the hills, pushed, bolstered by a peasant…
Zinat is a local personality on the island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf. She was the first woman in her village to take off the ‘borgheh’, a traditional veil worn by women in this region. In another big battle against the established rules, she is now standing as one of the few woman candidates in Iran’s first local election in 20 years.
In October 1998, in Paris, Johan van der Keuken learns from his doctor that he has only a few years left to live. With his wife Noshka van der Lely, who is the sound technician of all his films, he decides to devote the precious time left to seeing and listening. His journey takes him from Bhutan to Africa, from Rio to San Francisco.
In 1950, Robert Frank meets the Chinese painter Sanyu. Fifteen years later, Sanyu dies in Paris, poor and forgotten. Thirty years later, Robert Frank decides to sell Sanyu’s paintings…
When they were young, Xiao Wu and Xiao Yong were great friends, working together as pickpockets. Xiao Wu still does, practicing his trade with artisan-like devotion. Xiao Yong, on the other hand, has moved up in the world…
São Paulo sung in the rhymes of its northeastern troubadours. Through their poetry we discover this megapolis to the rhythm of forró and drums.
“Life has shown me nothing but contempt. Living in ghost houses other people have emptied. I’ve lived in houses that not even a witch would live in! But I’ve also been in houses that were worth it… All the houses I’ve lived in were illegal houses. They were houses abandoned by other people, but if it was a decent person living in them… they wouldn’t crush them down. That’s the way it was, house after house. I’ve paid more for things I haven’t done, than for the things I did.”
In 1999, the laying of the first fiber-optic cable in South-East Asia crossed through Cambodia. It is an opportunity for many Cambodians, whether they are poverty-stricken farmers, demobilised soldier or families without resources, to find a job.
In 1999, the laying of the first fiber-optic cable in South-East Asia crossed through Cambodia. It is an opportunity for many Cambodians, whether they are poverty-stricken farmers, demobilised soldier or families without resources, to find a job.
Andrijana Stojkovic captures simple everyday gestures with absolute precision. The Serbian director’s work, brief for now, offers dialogue-free observations on spaces that have become home and the passage of time in these interior places.
Music and oral sharing are the starting points for the work of Marie-Clémance Paes and Cesar Paes, whose films explore socio-political themes through forms that elevate presence and discourse with the aim of raising awareness of the reality in question.
Danielle Arbid, born in Lebanon, left the country during the civil war in 1987, travelling to Paris to study literature and later journalism. She worked for several years as a journalist, focussing on the Arab world. From 1997, he devoted himself to cinema, making the short fiction films Raddem and Le Passeur.
In what could be considered his first foray into documentary, Pedro Costa dismantles any possibility of categorisation. After three feature films made between 1989 and 1997, No Quarto da Vanda definitively interrupts the systematisation of the production process and calls into question all the notions that this system informs about the relationship between film and reality.
Rithy Pahn is a Cambodian film director whose work focuses on the consequences of the autocratic and totalitarian Khmer Rouge regime, under which the Cambodian people witnessed genocide, famine, misery and exhaustion between 1975 and 1979. Pahn fled to Thailand in 1979, escaping the tragic end that befell his family. He later fled to Paris, where he discovered cinema.
Sergey Dvorstsevoy is a Kazakh director who came to cinema in the early 1990s after almost a decade as an air navigation specialist. The three documentary shorts he has made to date have gained critical acclaim for their naturalistic and lyrical approach to portraying isolated and nomadic societies.