Berlin Documentary Forum 1

New practices across disciplines 02.06.2010 - 06.06.2010

The new bi-annual BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM presents documentary practices across disciplines, demonstrating the increasingly significant and much-debated role of the documentary in the visual arts, performance, literature and cinema.

The BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM looks both at contemporary developments in the extended field of documentary and at the changing status of documentary forms through history. The first edition of the forum brings together an international group of artists, filmmakers and curators invited to organize film screenings, live performances, public talks, readings and art exhibitions. The BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM was founded by Hila Peleg, who acts as the festival’s artistic director.

The first edition of the BERLIN DOCUMENTARY FORUM includes:

‘Documentary Moments’, a series of public talks and screenings put together by filmmaker Eyal Sivan. It is an effort to elaborate the history of documentary film through encounters with and between filmmakers who witnessed and shaped particular moments in the practice’s history. ‘Documentary Moments: Renaissance’ is an homage to a generation of artists, who contributed to the revival of documentary film in the post-war period. Participants include filmmakers Edgar Morin, Marcel Ophuls, Alain Resnais, Frederick Wiseman, and more.

Curator Okwui Enwezor presents ‘Rules of Evidence’, an interdisciplinary program examining notions of testimony and witnessing, fundamental to the public dissemination and reception of the documentary form. Against the tendency to offer the documentary as purely a matter of making images visible, this project seeks to withdraw – temporarily – from the documentary as a fact/truth-based regime. It involves a five-day live reading from documentary accounts of historic events, installations by artists Tony Cokes and Juan Maidagan & Dolores Zinny conceived in response to those accounts, and a collaboration with a major German newspaper reflecting the place of the photographic document in the media.

‘Der Möglichkeitsraum (The Blast of the Possible)’ is a temporary set conceived by video artist Angela Melitopoulos as an extended post-production studio. In three events, curators and archivists enter into a dialogue about their work on specific films and video archives. Each event is conceived as a performative live-montage, questioning histories of the cinematic image, the gaps and omissions in historical imagery and the construction of spaces of memory. With Brian Holmes, Bettina Knaup, and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus.

Curator Eduardo Thomas presents a selection of contemporary experimental documentaries – all shown as German premieres. The program brings together films recently shot in South America, the Middle East and Asia. The discussions with the filmmakers depart from previously dominant notions such as ‘authorship’, ‘authority’ and ‘authenticity’. With filmmakers Uruphong Raksasad, João Moreira Salles, Ben Russell, and more.

Florian Schneider conducts long-term research on political documentary films for German television produced from the 1960s to the early 1980s. This period marks the peak of a sub-genre of exceptional standing in the history of television that is nearly forgotten today. The project begins with a presentation of films by one of the most idiosyncratic and exacting protagonists from this period, Michael Mrakitsch, about whom Die Zeit once wrote: ‘Mrakitsch–this is the triumph of documentary over fiction.’

Further contributions by Catherine David, Ariella Azoulay, Omer Fast, Rabih Mroué, Issam Nasser and many others.
Contact: berlin.doc.forum@hkw.de