This year’s selection demonstrates the vastness of the documentary genre, the value of its past and the possibilities of its present, and it brings together works that are seemingly distant in nature. The profession of documentary filmmaker is a dangerous one, a participatory narrative full of pitfalls: we discover this with Schroeder, an intrepid witness of the dictatorship in Uganda; with Roemer and his portrait of mafia violence; with Labudović, sent by Tito to fuel – through cinema – the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria.

Documentary is anchored in reality; it tells us about the greatest social revolution of the last century, that of women, through the brilliant portraits of three female artists (the orchestra conductor Antonia Brico and two pioneers of cinema, Dorothy Arzner and Agnès Varda) and the unstoppable struggle for visibility of homosexuality in cinema. Documentary is an instrument of self-analysis through which cinema narrates itself, its own language; we explore the origins of the “cinematic truth” genre starting with the archives of Robert Flaherty, we retrace the Mexican period of Eisenstein, we immerse ourselves in the fluid gaze of Ghezzi, and we rediscover Godard’s legendary Canadian lessons. Cinema talks about cinema; cinema talks about us.

Read the selection of films curated by Gian Luca Farinelli.