[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”32″ gal_title=”master-class-on-documentary-film/”]
What is a coherent way to make documentary films? What is it expected from us in the film market? Who sets the rules for the stories we want to tell and who determines what stories are worth being told? Are we exploring our own gaze or are adapting to the gaze of the other?
Find out answers to these questions and explore more with us at the playground on Friday, August 31 with Manuel F Contreras, a visiting PhD candidate from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.
About the session
The film market has already defined a set of imaginaries that dictate the stories that should come from each region of the world, and in most cases the privileged are filming the unprivileged, not the other way around, just like in the origins of documentary film: observe the exotic, the distant subject. Us defined by the filmmaker or we as filmmakers defining the other.
This masterclass departs from the fact that the one filming is the one that holds the power, the one being filmed is the mirror of the filmmaker, thus the story being told is actually the story of the one behind the camera. As stated once by Elia Kazan: in some subtle or not-so-subtle way, every film is autobiographical.
A coherent documentary filmmaking is the search for an honest approach in which we can explore a point of view that is not repeating a formula that doesn’t belong to us, a way to find our voice in an industry that has already given us a role we, as filmmakers, didn’t ask for, but we seldom realize it.
About the instructor
Manuel F Contreras is a Colombian documentary filmmaker that explores these issues of representation through his work and the study of contemporary Latin-American documentary film. He is a candidate for a PhD in Arts at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. He is also the head of programming of the Budapest International Documentary Film Festival and the main programmer of Deli-Doku Budapest.
