Play.Doc Festival in Galician City Tui
Thanks to a Cineuropa website (very actual, well written and edited, covering also a lot of documentary events and films) and a link from the article, I got to know about the Play-Doc 2015 festival (Festival Internacional de Documentals) that runs now and until April 26, the 11th edition, with welcoming words from Mexican director Nicolás Pereda, I have taken a clip:
“In a world in which people communicate with each other by phone and computer, in which artistic collectives are becoming ever thinner on the ground and cultural events are becoming more and more impersonal, Playdoc is a breath of fresh air, a model for other festivals across the world to follow.
Playdoc is a festival made in the same way as the films which it screens. For those filmmakers working outside the industry, events of this type are essential. The festival gives attendees time and space to reflect on the films…”
The program proves he is right. There is a competition where I recognise films like Göran Olsson’s “Concerning Violence” (photo), Fernand Melgar’s “The Shelter” but most interesting is that the festivals hosts a seminar on criticism, a series of workshops led by super-competent Marta Andreu from Barcelona, who has written fine articles for the website and is talking about the project “Docs in Progress” on a video that introduces what the festival does, again a clip from a text by Andreu:
… In December 2010, Play-Doc initiated the first edition of Docs in Progress. For two weeks eight film-makers lived in a rural guest-house, in the vicinity of Tui, in order to share the process of working on their documentaries at the editing stage. Throughout the encounter, the exchange of viewings, trials, experiences and creative concerns generated a space for reflection, and for creative questioning, in order to come closer to the very best version of each of the works selected. Film-makers coming from distinct parts of the world (Uruguay, Spain, Germany, Iceland, Argentina, Brazil and Galicia) have, in this way, made available to others their own creation; putting it at the service of dialogue; asking the images themselves what film lies buried within them; whilst exposing the images to the gaze of others, so as to realise its birth…
And of course there is a retrospective – with Claire Simon.
Unpretentious and serious, like it!
