Death in the Port Jackson Hotel is a film portrait of the Australian artist Vali Myers. Van der Elsken got acquainted with her in post-war Paris. His pictures of her resulted in the pictorial history A love affair in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Love on the Left Bank). Eighteen years later Vali pays a visit to the photographer on his farm in Edam. Van der Elsken films her while she brings back memories looking at photographs that are shown to her. She talks about OD victims, suicides and her opium addiction. He also films her in his kitchen while she is making the drawing ‘Death in the Port Jackson Hotel’. And finally he films her in a valley near Naples, where she leads a secluded life with her 19-year-old boyfriend.

“Why has my shitty life turned out like this? No-one knows. Not even God. God’s on holiday and he’s reading porn” – an excerpt from Diary of the Forgotten, the journal kept by the main protagonist in another of Helena Třeštíková’s long-term documentaries. With raw authenticity, the director records the luckless fate of René over a period of twenty years as he yo-yos between prison and freedom. The film questions the relationship between filmmaker and protagonist. A story of overwhelming power that goes straight to where it hurts.

“Thirteen years ago, when I shot these images, I thought the film would begin like this…” This is the first line of narration in João Moreira Salles’ Santiago. A film not simply about Santiago, the filmmaker’s family’s butler, but about failure, about memory and about documentary filmmaking. In 1992, the filmmaker shot nine hours of footage, but aborted the project on the cutting room table. It is by looking at the outtakes of the original footage 13 years later that Salles deconstructs the myths of documentary filmmaking and makes a film that is as much about him as it is about Santiago.