Documentary Competition

In a post-factual media society, documentary film appears to be afforded a special role. How can cinema speak about reality, when reality is increasingly subject to negotiation? How can documentary forms fulfil their mission as intermediaries while taking their creators' subjectivity into account? The Documentary Film Competition at the 38th edition of INTERFILM tackles these twin questions in the scope of two thematic programs – revolving on the one hand around violence, war, inhumanity, trauma and healing, and nature, environment, the Anthropocene and lived reality on the other – where discourses concerning presentability, truth and affect seem to crystalise in an almost physical manner. The films of the two programs search for new ways to show the unshowable, to finally speak the unspeakable. Combative films stand alongside subjective, intimate essays, grand gestures alongside gentle observations. An aesthetic range that only short (documentary) film is capable of providing.