Festival Film Dokumenter 2022

A Paradoks

Marginal is a word attached to documentaries; they depart from issues in various parts of the world, are produced through trial and error, demand a long time, and are screened in limited spaces detached from celebrations or festivities. We can barely mention things that attract people to watch or air documentary films other than getting information as data or a limited medium to convey a fact. At least, these things have brought us to know the definition of documentary film in Indonesia, 20 years on.

Documentaries seem to carry myths and heavy burdens that serve things that are arduous to digest, full of challenges, and produced in various ways; hence, sometimes, they evoke tension in terms of those genres of film as the medium themselves. We, as the audience, have been in a situation where fiction and non-fiction, while tracing certain films, were debated in seeing a variety of variables and methods of producing films. Boundaries need to exist to affirm the context of making ideas, perspectives, and images in the work process. Still, it is not bad when these boundaries are intentionally dissolved through some perspective while saying something using language and ideas that are mutually reinforcing. How come these age-old boundaries are able to be a bridge of every growing thought?

Here, the function of various exhibition spaces that have existed, together with films, as well as audiences who grow and develop, they involve in a process and strengthen each other. Space, at the end of the day, no longer gives legitimacy to something; it is not just a place to celebrate the presence of various films. Still, it provides reflective space for multiple stacks of work and explores other perspectives. Also, it presents the events which can be delivered through the language of cinema and its journey, even though it might appear or be created from quiet corners.

A film is more than a face of the complexity of a region. Each film and genre has a way of conveying things, images, and information differently. These dynamics live together, hand in hand, to complete each other, just like in every archive and picture of events, which leads us to the conclusion of how cinema speaks. This year’s films attempt to bring the sequence of events and the dynamics of the social, economic, and political situation. We will see how the wounds of the world become a part of the memory of every society.

I believe every film will meet its audience in its space and the right way because space, film, and audience are inseparable. Thank you for being a part of Festival Film Dokumenter’s journey until today.

– Alia Damaihati