Growing public acclaim (more than 12,700 film spectators at the fourth edition) and the increase in films in the running for selection in the various competition sections (999 titles coming from 79 different countries) have made
Documenta Madrid a film festival with one of the highest number of international projections in Spain. New features of the fifth edition include two new film theatres to the 14 previous. Casa Arabe is opening its doors to the festival with the aim of broadening the spectrum of cinematographic works participating in the event, which has solidified as a window on the world. Furthermore, the Spanish
Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematograficas is also making its projection theatre available to Spanish documentaries in DOCUMENTA.
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Distressed Filmmaker For its fifth edition, DOCUMENTA 08 has chosen to pay tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007), a member of a never-to-be-seen again generation of Italian filmmakers like Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini, who exploited films possibilities for showing reality in a unique way. Born in Ferrara, Antonioni stands out for his brave re-definition of the narrative concept of film by challenging established norms of telling a story on film. He was able to tell, evoke and suggest merely with a silent succession of carefully framed austere images. His photographic eye and his capacity to extract beauty and meaning with the frame have few equivalents in the history of film. The Italian director attempted
photograph the surface of things and discover what is hidden inside of them, thus creating ghostly settings where his characters wander around as fleeting figures of absence. With this minimalist style, he portrayed loneliness and lack of communication, the enigma of a distressed world, all of which Antonioni himself defined as
incomunicabilita and can be seen in documentaries such as
Gente del Po (1943-1947),
Sette canne, un vestito (1949),
Kumbha Mela (1989),
Noto-Mandorli Vulcano-Stromboli Carnevale (1992) or
Sguardo di Michelangelo (2004), one of his last works, for which he received the International Critics Award in the Short Films Section of the SEMINCI Festival in Valladolid (Spain) in 2004.
Filmotech.com Award As a pioneering initiative, DOCUMENTA 08 organizers and the management staff at EGEDA Digital have decided to set up the
Filmotech.com Award, by which the festival will come to life online beyond its official website. Makers of films in the Competition Sections can, if they wish, post their films online so that, with all guarantees of legality, they will be able to have their works downloaded and seen anywhere in the world. The filmmakers who choose to do so will be competing for the Filmotech.com Award for best documentary, with prize money of 3,000 euros.
Elegias Intimas: the heart of films exposed and dissected by their masters Within the Informative Sections of the festival stand out a series of films which cover the history of cinema from the points of view of its creators. The relationships between filmmakers across time periods or cultures is one of the curiosities which are explored in works like
Roads to Kiarostami (2006), an unusual journey by Abbas Kiarostami in the course of his work.
JLG/JLG: autoportrait de decembre (1995) is a profound reflection by Jean Luc Goddard on the Seventh Art. In
Il giorno della prima di ´Close Up´ (1996), Nanni Moretti reviews the preparations for the film deut of
Close Up by Kiarostami, while in
Filming ´Othello´ (1978) Orson Welles uses material shot in the preparation for the film to make an interesting cinematographic essay. Other big name filmmakers in this series include Ingmar Bergman (
Karins ansikte, 1984), Wim Wenders (
Tokyo-Ga, 1985), Peter Tscherkassky (
Outer Space, 1999), Jose Luis Guerin (
Innisfree, 1989), Federico Fellini (
Block-notes di un regista, 1969), and Chris Marker (
Une journee d´Andrei Arsenevitch, 2000).
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