Curating and presenting a program of contemporary documentary cinema is a complex process for all festivals and cinema platforms, at any point of time. To present it in our current, contemporary moment, can feel, and it thus feels, most of the time, impossible.

In favour of time and space, I will skip the difficulties coming from the documentary form itself. I would rather take a tiny bit of space to remind about the difficulties coming from the social and political currents we are protagonists of. The times we witness and the times we contribute to, call for greater urgencies. In the context of witnessing on the very same devices where cinema resides the most violent acts in history of humanity so far,  the role of the programmers and curators at the least goes beyond the form. Documentary cinematographic practices, in addition to the audiovisual experience, produce film subjects. Which are the subjects – themes, people, spaces, practices – that we need to share with, learn from, grow and get together with? Which and whose are the images we need to see?

The Documentary Competition programme of Manaki ICFF gathers what many would see peripheral: cinema as a living space of documenting the underrepresented small acts of survival. Cinema that turns into a space where form is constantly challenged and reinvented in order to serve life and survival.

This year’s selection brings together eight films from many more places than eight countries: we welcome eight films that in tiny, dedicated, generous cinematic and cinematographic acts bring and open up worlds.

In times when many of us are deeply involved in ways of rejecting the world as it is, we were generously offered by each one of the images shared with us shelters where we could feel, we could see, we could live and maybe we could for a tiny bit love the world. Love the world for what it could be, and for how it can feel. And love ourselves for the people we can be to others, for the people we can be to ourselves and for the people we can become.

Thanks to each and every filmmaker, we are honoured to share with you the Documentary Programme of the 46th Manaki Brothers International Cinematographers’ Film Festival.

Kumjana Novakova,
Programmer