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Why a documentary? |
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The viewer of a documentary is someone who is seeking a means of knowledge which is inseparable from a passion for images. Documentaries bring about a transformation: they convey a perspective which, in turn, changes something in those watching.
The documentary isn't just a cinema that opens its doors to the world. The world, in turn, is opened up by the documentary, which doesn't just limit itself to presenting evidence or giving accounts. A documentary awakens new viewing and listening zones for those willing to stretch and add a new dimension to their perception. The pressure exerted by the mass media tends to limit the documentary to the field of journalism, and to pigeonhole it as a genre. It is necessary to combat this attempt to domesticate it.
In the same way that a viewer of a documentary is aroused by an impulse to learn, so is he or she encouraged by a vocation to become acquainted with others. Documentaries create communities and renew the visual culture. Nowadays new media provide brand new possibilities for this essential quality both traditional and gregarious.
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Why Latin America? |
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In our region, there exists a long tradition and a dynamic renewal of the Latin American documentary. On the other hand, new styles of documentary have appeared with increasing frequency in the last few decades. There are abundant signs that something important is taking place in our field, and that its effects are spreading to the world of the cinema.
However, a large percentage of Latin American commercial screens still march in time with global entertainment. Premieres of documentaries in cinemas are rare, and television tends to restrict the form to something approaching very standardized news reports or exposures of matters in the public interest.
Beyond what one can see at festivals or other specialized events, the mass media show a stereotype image of Latin America; an invented image of the region that is spread all over the world. This format of the media can only be reversed by one's own intervention with an image policy that links production, distribution and access. Opening more specialized cinemas, although necessary, is not enough in itself; neither is scheduling more documentaries on traditional television. The documentary needs spaces of development, of transmission and growth on networks that go further than the commercial logic of audiovisual entertainment.
Right now Latin America is ready to become a geographical and cultural platform to make itself more visible on a global scale, by means of the resources provided by the new media.
It isn't a question, as is often stated, of promoting reflection. The opportunity is to put together and put into circulation images and points of view about reality, using what reality provides as a base, and in this same manoeuvre to recognize what is one's own and the elements present of others. It's only in this way that a 'we' can come to life.
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Why Docfera? |
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The documentary is a terrain of exploration and change and requires means of access in harmony with its current developments. Docfera seeks to expand and diversify the transmission, the forum and the discussion of the images of our region and era. On such a virtual platform, from its Latin American location, a field of global action is opened up.
A documentary in Docfera broadens its potential. Not only does your entering this zone widen the means of access to the material and contact between authors and viewers, but it also widens what it allows you to see (and consequently do) in environments amplified by these new means.
The challenge, essentially, is to multiply our ways of seeing and participating in the world through an innovative incursion into audiovisual culture.
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