Sheffield Doc/Fest 2017/2
Carol Nahra, one of many fine contributors to the late DOX Magazine, made late May a fine interview with the new Sheffield Doc/Fest festival director Luke Moody (photo) on her ”Docs on Screen”. The whole interview – link below – is recommended as Moody not only talk about films from the festival but comes up with interesting comments and reflections on the documentary of today, like these ones:
Question: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how documentary storytelling is evolving creatively and expanding and overlapping with drama?
There are two directions, or trends that I’ve seen in particular. There’s a renewed interest and passion for verité storytelling. Really strong observational films produced over three or four or six years in some cases, that are just like really close and warm narratives. The majority of those are family stories, things like The Cage Fighter, or Quest, which is a really outstanding debut by a filmmaker who was a photographer… Mama Colonel is another one of those, by Congolese filmmaker Dieudo Hamadi, which is like a Kim Longinotto film. So there has just been this – I guess it’s not a reemergence of that style of storytelling, because a lot of them are made over a long period of time – but perhaps it’s a reaction to the presence of fake news these days. People are wanting to return to very much the nitty gritty of factual storytelling and observation and just being very embedded within a community that they’re trying to portray. So that they get some sort of shared truth within that development. And I think the majority are films which have not been initially funded. They are things that have evolved from other projects…
… (the other) has this really strong conceptual approach to filmmaking and the way that we interpret reality to storytelling. Ghost Hunting is one of the most powerful. A really reflexive piece that explores the power between direction of a filmmaker and those portrayed on the camera, to the point where the tide turns and they start to question what he’s trying to achieve with the film. And he has to then become open and become vulnerable as a director to be part of that shared experience of change within the film…
