Play-Doc 2012 | Play-Doc Laboratory | International Documentary Festival

DOCS IN PROGRESS

by Marta Andreu

We are already getting through another winter since the Docs in Progress of December 2010. The living together of film-makers in the process of creation has now produced its first results. There were eight visions, eight projects that had already progressed on their account before arriving at the Docs, where they finally found their right form. Two weeks dedicated to intense effort, completely committed, fragile but convincing, has served to consolidate the works, submitting them to reflection, to questioning, to the search for their true natures. Time has now moved on, sufficiently far for some of those films that once existed now to exist no longer. Others, however, are well on their way. Now we want to share some of the projects that have gone through that unforgetable experience and have emerged from it. We shall do this by showing fragments, pieces taken from the films involved, so we can begin to see the universes that dwelt within us in those days that we shared together.

One of the full-length films is already travelling around the world, invited by international festivals; Exiliados by Mariana Viñoles. In addition some of the other projects continue to show signs of life under the spirit of Docs in Progress, progressing and growing towards their final form, being edited further, even returning to shoot new film, asking once again what film is enclosed here: Here good examples are Entre Lineas (Between lines) by Yrsa Roca Fannberg or Bosques (Forests) by Nina Bendzko.

To show fragments of these four titles is a pleasure for us, now that we are allowed to share the honour of being able to see the finished work or at least to see the work taken forward with determination, work in which we believed and which we have helped, trying to strengthen it, enrich it and to incorporate in it the idea of a cinema that we all love.

So this session that we are proposing will invite us to submerge ourselves in diverse universes, in personal projects, in authentic films. At the same time it will reflect the commitment of these film-makers to artistic creation combined with an equal insistence on the real world, a vision of which they are seeking to capture. Each of these unique visions interact with the others, and each holds up a mirror to the others and on their surfaces are left the different traces of but a single breath. All of these visions speak, from their own viewpoint, of that same shared space and time; that of Docs in Progress.

FILMED PORTRAIT Portrait-Landscape

by Marta Andreu

Can the tree speak about the one who, each day, brushes its trunk with his fingers as he passes? Can a cloud make the gestures of a child on waking? Can the sound of the river tells us the measure of things? I would say they can. Surely, yes. We may wish that it were so. So as to be able to go on believing. And creating.

Four years have passed. The same ones of us that were behind the cameras return to the place that took us in. And those who were in front of them go on generously offering us their everyday life to be converted into an image, a story, an evocation of feeling and memory. But to tell the truth, we are not the same. No really. Palmira is no longer with us. And we, both the ones in front of the lenses and the ones behind it, are no longer exactly those who we were, neither the ones nor the others, for time passes and has passed. And this is what time does, it takes one thing and leaves it another, equal but distinct. Time has taken us across the meridian and now we are approaching the end of the adventure. And yet this laboratory that we are making together continues taking patient care of the seed which is germinating within it: As each year passes the eight cineasts move forward, strengthening their individual documentary styles, and their careers in film-making that they are thereby building go on taking shape, little by little. From the encounter the past emerges and the people that surround us can also tell us something about ourselves. This year, we shall paint the set, all of it, and it will be converted into the protagonist. The persons who we are occupy places, we dwell in them, we move along their ways, we make them our own, until we loose ourselves in them. Or is it the other way round. . . .? The places dwell in us, they move around among us, they make us theirs, they loose themselves in our eyes, until we are merged with them and reveal who we are. A cut-out figure in a landscape or a cut-out landscape in a figure. Somehow we go around from the one to the other, to continue adding brush-strokes to these lives that we started to make portraits of some years ago and we do it looking landscape in the eye and asking across the camera "Of what are those personages made?" that we now seem to know.