Princeton Documentary Festival

PRINCETON DOCUMENTARY FESTIVAL 2011

Pictures and Words

In the beginning was the Word. Documentary is often taken as the realm of the word. The voice of God narration, the eye-witness account, the confession, the sound-bite. The genre is plagued by words. Words that tell the truth, words that speak with authority, words that tell us what to see, words that are backed up by imagery as if it were evidence or –all too often- words that could quite simply do without pictures. For many Latin American documentary filmmakers, not surprisingly, words have come readily under suspicion. By the same token, the evidence presented by pictures is rarely accepted without questions. The films presented in this year’s program all work the equivocal relationship between words and pictures. In Invernadero, a real writer plays a fictional writer who shares his own name, Mario Bellatín, but not necessarily all of the same attributes. Pan-Cinema Permanente takes its title from a poem by another very real writer, Wally Salomão, who talks about the omnipresence of fiction in real life. In Cuchillo de palo, the off-screen words of the young filmmaker interact in disquieting ways with her own presence on screen as she grapples with her father’s silence. Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo imposes an imaginary first-person narration on documentary images of a real trip to the hinterland of the Brazilian Sertão. Each after its own wayward fashion, every one of these four extraordinary films compels us to examine the truth claims of words and pictures in the documentary context. And, by extension, consider the uses of the documentary genre itself.

Andrés Di Tella

Artistic Director

Thursday, March 24, 2011

4.30pm - Welcome by Gabriela Nouzeilles, Executive Director, and Andrés Di Tella, Artistic Director

Viajo porque preciso, volto porque te amo

by Karim Aïnouz and Marcelo Gomes (Brazil, 2009, 75 min.)

Commentary by Bruno Carvalho, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Followed by discussion with Karim Aïnouz

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Friday, March 25, 2011

3.30pm - Pan-Cinema Permanente
by Carlos Nader (Brazil, 2007, 83 min.)
Commentary by João Moreira Salles, Council of the Humanities/Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Followed by discussion with Carlos Nader

BREAK

5.30pm - Invernadero
by Gonzalo Castro (Argentina, 2010, 90 min.)
Commentary by Gabriela Nouzeilles, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Followed by discussion with Gonzalo Castro

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Saturday, March 26, 2011

11am - A Conversation with Ricardo Piglia on the Documentary Genre
Discussants: Andrés Di Tella and João Moreira Salles

12.30pm - BREAK

1:30pm - Cuchillo de palo / "108"
by Renate Costa (Paraguay/Spain, 2010, 108 min.)
Commentary by Rachel Price, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Followed by discussion with Renate Costa

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