Festival Film Dokumenter 2024

The world is a place where a series of things occur, in which the narrative of time becomes a signifier or identity and is shaped by a paradox of history that is reproduced continuously. We are stranded asking questions about everything: the future, the meaning of life, the struggles, the continuing downturns, and about history not being okay. Various theories and practices try to build bridges between the millions of pieces of memories, facts and speculations that are scattered in the history of many periods of time. The emergence of various movements is also inevitable for criticism, just as the third cinema emerged as a critique of the first and second cinema of its time. While in its development, it also gives the possibility of the emergence of the term fourth cinema and so on with its various illusory constructions in response to the narrative of time.

Simply put, how humans live their time and their lives, apart from being a critique in the narrative of time, has also become a strong phrase in the films that have revolved in various programs in FFD 2024 regarding temporality. Various films try to get out of the tight gap of tension over forms and readings that often question the “faithfulness” in the work, a faithfulness that often keeps us confined. In fact, film has transcended its narrative as the language of cinema that exists today, through various technological developments as a medium and aesthetics as a tool that works on the medium itself. Even so, film has also presented various mechanisms of symbiotic interaction in its liminal space.

This path of defining temporality is not strictly valid, but as an attempt to state the invisible in the understanding of film–documentary–has been passed with various visual and sound storytelling traces in the films presented this year. This tests how festivals are no longer interpreted as meeting points and celebrations of artistic triumphs, but also give legitimacy to the blending of forms of work and examines its transformation, and how it has become part of a global colony that cannot be navigated from a singular perspective. An argument about the temporality of this year’s programs is not to dismiss existing cinema practices. Rather, it is a long meditation on the complexity of how we define film and its flux over time.

Take a bite, then you will see!

Alia Damaihati