Festival Film Dokumenter 2018 (FFD) officially starts on Wednesday, December 5th, 2018. Located at Societet Militair Taman Budaya Yogyakarta, on its 17th year, the annual festival opens with the screening of Beautiful Things (Giorgio Ferrero, 2017), which captures the story of workers in areas that are difficult to reach human life. This agenda also enlivened by musician Umar Haen.
This year, FFD decided not to raise a specific theme for the festival. It is done in hope to revive the initial spirit of FFD in observing the development of documentaries as a social reflection and educational media; Recording The Remnants, Searching for The Unseen, Finding Insight.
FFD 2018 will be held in eight days, starts from December 5th, 2018 until December 12th, 2018. FFD is held in two venues, including: Taman Budaya Yogyakarta and IFI-LIP Yogyakarta. There are four main agendas in this festival: Competition and Non-Competition Screening, Discussions and Presentations, Exhibition and Workshops.
Like in previous years, there were 3 categories in this year’s competition: Feature-Length Documentary, Short Documentary, and Student Documentary. Juries involved in Feature-Length Documentary Competition are Makiko Wakai (Programmer of Yamagata International Film Festival), Nicolas Boone (French Filmmaker), and Bonnie Triyana (Indonesian Historian). For Short Documentary category, the juries are Mandy Marahimin (Producer of Tanakhir Films), Aryo Danusiri (Indonesian Filmmaker), and Fan Wu (Programer of Taiwan International Documentary Festival). Meanwhile, for Student Documentary category, the juries are: Jason Iskandar (Indonesian Filmmaker), Alexander Matius (Programmer of Kinosaurus), and Vivian Idris (Indonesian Filmmaker).
The Non-Competition screening agenda is divided into 13 programs: “Perspektif” (perspective); “Spektrum” (spectrum); “Retrospektif” (retrospective); “The Feelings of Reality”; “Taiwan Documentary: Into the Time Capsule”; “Polish Docs: Looking After the Family”; “A Play of Perspective”; “Fragmen Kecil Asia” (small Asian fragment); “Human, Frame by Frame”; “DocSound”; “Lanskap” (landscape); “Le Mois du Documentaire”; and “Special Screening: Talking Money”.
DocTalk will hold two discussions agenda titled: Film Criticism: How Matter Does Critics? and the On Table Programming Discussion Series, which consists of three sessions: Festival Programmer, SEA Movie, and Papua Film Festival.
This year’s complementary agenda is the Film Criticism Workshop, a collaboration between FFD and Yamagata International Documentari Film Festival which will be held intensively on December 6th to 11th, 2018.
Through the various themes and agendas chosen, FFD believes that documentaries have a significant role in educating the public and providing space for the rise of alternative perspectives that are rarely touched by mainstream media. We hope that as a medium, documentary films can be utilized as an independent aspiration media, creating reflective messages, across the boundaries of space and time.
