Ethics and Documentary

The seventh edition of this Conference faces a question increasingly acknowledged as key for documentary film today: its relation with ethics. In the last “Visible Evidence”, Michael Renov affirmed this was the most pressing issue. In a recent lecture, João Moreira Salles argued that the specific in documentary film lies in the ethics arena.

Marina Goldovskaya, in her superb book of memories, reminded us how such discussion was accelerated with the coming of 16 mm cameras and now the digital means. The Russian master went straight to the point: "Ethics is ethics as it is not ruled by law; it is a matter of conscience. Conscience is a very personal thing and each of us determines what is acceptable. Thus, the issue of ethics in documentary films is much more important than in fiction films, where we deal with models of all kinds of human behavior. In documentaries we have real situations, not models. This raises the filmmaker's responsibility and the demands about his/her human attributes."

We must not expect ready answers or handy formulas from this conference. What we must do is to pay attention to the issues which make ethics a compelling concern for the production and the study of documentary film today. Our humble intention is to keep the discussion going, aware that is it impossible to finish it in a few round tables, even when they are made up of high-level thinkers and artists like the ones gathered here.

Philosophical issues and concrete cases will be addressed. A selection of documentaries is meant to complement the debate. In this edition, a new feature is a closing talk between the critic Ismail Xavier anda the filmmaker Jorge Bodanzky, to whom last year's festival paid homage with a retrospective. Welcome!

AMIR LABAKI e MARIA DORA G. MOURÃO