For the past few months, we have been selecting films that help us to understand the world around us, from the powerful to the personal. In our own humble way, we wish to play a part in bringing to light essential building blocks to becoming better citizens. Thus, the documentary trends in our selection align around the following three virtues: paying attention to others, focusing on oneself to find inspiration for a better world, and seeing the world as it is without lowering one’s gaze nor one’s camera. Documentaries become an equalizer when they give voice to the forgotten, the silenced, the rebels.
When they go against prevailing forms of representation, as an art form that has unfailingly built itself to oppose the supremacy of fiction. When they open our screens and our eyes to other, sometimes invisible, realities. Documentaries are the genre that cannot cheat in portraying the realities of the world, and furthermore, they must not.
Giving a voice to those who are overlooked by current affairs: Native Americans in Yintah by Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell, and Michael Toledano; young people in Sudan, Remember Us by Hind Meddeb; Fierro, the Mexican hero who was wrongfully imprisoned for 50 years in The Freedom of Fierro by Santiago Esteinou… We travel from Brittany to visit an organic farmer in Eric Guéret’s Sur la paille to Basque Country, where in Amaia Merino Unzueta and Ander Iriarte’s Let it be known, a doctor dies tortured by Spanish authorities.
For the number of elections around the world, 2024 was a record-breaking year. Now that the world seems to be divided once again between two nations, come meet the Russians and Americans who respectively believe in Putin (Happiness to All) and Trump (Homegrown).
At the head of other nations, certain leaders desperately cling to power such as Israel’s Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu (The Bibi Files), while others rule with restraint like Slovakia’s Ms President by Marek Šulik. Elections were to be held in Ukraine in 2024 as well, but war rages on (Songs of Slow Burning Earth by Olha Zhurba). Both on the front lines and far from them, Ukrainians discover the invisible wounds of a drawn-out war in Dad’s Lullaby by Lesia Diak.
Battlefields both destroy and reveal humanity. This upsetting paradox is embodied by exceptional human beings in Résister pour la paix by Hanna Assouline and Sonia Terrab, and I Shall Not Hate: A Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Tal Barda. We have given these films a place of honour with a meet-and-greet with the directors of both films, who will be joined by Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish.
Darkness and Light struggle for supremacy in yet another combat zone – our personal lives – featured in many films in this year’s selection: with anger in Une Famille by Christine Angot, with flair in François Mauriac, Maverick Despite Himself by Virginie Linhart, with tact in Siblings by Juliette Cazanave, with coarseness in This Is My Body by Jérôme Clément-Wiltz, and with humour in The Man with a Thousand Faces by Sonia Kronlund…
What about reverie? Documentaries clear the way to daydreaming with Orlando, the life of a composer in the Renaissance by Joachim Thôme, Ravel in a Thousand Sparkles by François-René Martin and Gordon, I Am Martin Parr by Lee Schulman, and Tracing Light by Thomas Riedelsheimer.
Lastly, our 7th edition celebrates the ocean with the incredible feat of a young yachtswoman and the adventures of her family for whom Home is the Ocean. Meanwhile, below the waves, Of Whales, Turtles, and People contrasts with Deep Rising, which uncovers the exploitation taking place on the ocean floor.
These films have been specially chosen for you, our beloved festivalgoers in Biarritz, and we sincerely hope you will enjoy them!
Long live doc! Long live Fipadoc!
Victor Hugo, Les Contemplations (1856)
