Festival Film Dokumenter 2025

The Finite & the Infinite

Basically, temporality is the basic structure for understanding human existence. However, the experience of modernity leads us to become linear or sequential when we imagine modern cinema tradition in general. The experience we can feel from temporality is how the past is always open. Simply put, conversations about the past in the present imply layers that grow in various conversations. Just as the understanding of cinema that constantly growing and open, it changes the way we see the everyday reality of human beings.

The appearance of cinema itself has changed the meaning of time, where cinematic time in the montage tradition can bring a more intense experience than real time in human reality. Who are we in this reality? Who are we in the reality of the films we watch? These simple questions provide a deeper experience and intention regarding space and time, simultaneity in spatial and temporal experiences, between events that take place in different places and times, and an infinity that cannot be traversed.

Like the universe that continuously reproduces itself, reality constantly transcends the infinite. Each work in this year’s festival carries its own heartbeat. Various of them naturally record space-time, but also stage scenes to direct their reality, reviving collective memory, conveying biological and historical time, and opening up new perspectives on a world that is increasingly noisy with long silences.

In a world of accelerating change and fluid truths, documentary cinema remains one of the few places where we pause a while to feel deeply. It became the place to see stories of strength in various forms of work that unite us, recording the evolving relationship between the camera and life, which has possessed its space-time structure.

Passing more than 2 decades is something that Festival Film Dokumenter never imagined. It is not an extraordinary number, but each journey is like a long passage of space and time. As Bob Dylan sings on “Maggie’s Farm”, “I try my best, to be just like I am, but everybody wants you, to be just like them”. Long life our persistence to traverse across the cosmos to worlds greater than our own.

Alia Damaihati
Festival Director