In partnership with Babushka Cultural Association, It’s All True presents this year a Brazilian retrospective that proposes to plot a pioneering chart, a fragment that does not exhaust itself and discloses a whole new world waiting to be explored and staked out: the experimental documentaries made in Brazil. Twenty-three titles produced between 1929 and 2007 have been selected for this section.

Now that the “society of the spetacle” has a foothold in a country torn by gaping contrasts, the documental impetus points its guns not just to a critique of reality but to a critique of the very instruments that represent such reality. The fake dichotomy French style (Lumiére or Méliès) is no longer capable of sustaining the complexity and ambiguity of a world that has been turned into fast-forward images. Paths no longer branch into fiction and documentary for both now intermingle and travel the same path. Just as the history of experimental cinema in Brazil is made up of lapses and fleeting moments, the profile of experimental documentary also follows the same irregular pattern, rife with episodic scarcity and quantitative rarefaction which, in inverse proportion, sometimes manages to project a set of diverse films filled with rare beauty and poetic confrontation.

Although it eludes definition, given its nature of free language experimentation and typical production methods, these films operate at a level where the very roots of conventional documentaries are challenged, bringing them closer to the abstract enunciation of music, or the conceptual configuration of art and even the fictional crafting of narrative.

Under the sign of “anti”, logic is revolved and the unlikely reversed. In experimental documentary films, the educational discourse is replaced by poetic digressions and the certainty of reality makes room for the imagination of truth. This year’s Festival program is an invitation to the viewer’s sense and sensibility to embark on an unexpected, boundless audiovisual journey, while instigating reflection and debate.

Carlos Adriano, Bernardo Vorobow e Amir Labaki
Curators


Support:
Cinemateca Brasileira, CTAV, ECA -USP, MIS, Videobrasil