British fest explores doc issues

Michael Allder is a National Film Board producer and is the director of The Lucky Ones: Allied Airmen at Buchenwald.

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Although it’s only in its second year, the Sheffield International Documentary Festival in Sheffield, Eng. is already one of the principal forums for the study and discussion of the documentary genre.

Organized by Sheffield University’s Media Studies faculty, the festival attracts an eclectic mix of English and international filmmakers, television executives from the bbc and commercial channels, media academics and students – a provocative and sometimes explosive mix.

There was talk of the perceived negative impact of the restructuring of the itv network and its parallel impact on the bbc, talk of the suggested imminent death of the fly-on-the-wall observational documentary, and talk of the growing opportunities emerging from the development of cable franchises.

But curiously enough, the one epithet that continually crept into public and private conversation was ‘Grierson.’ The influence of the indomitable Scot was seemingly inescapable.

In his opening keynote address, veteran television journalist and producer Jonathan Dimbelby spoke of the need for the ‘social responsibility’ that characterized the legacy of Canada’s distinguished immigrant.

In an attack on what he saw as the indulgences or emotional manipulation of some unnamed filmmakers, he called on the substantial British contingent in the audience to pay more attention to issues of social worth, to provide a more substantive and intellectual framework for issues of social concern, to use the documentary as Grierson did, ‘as a pulpit.’

However, Grierson’s stay at the altar was rudely cut short by the next principal speaker, British filmmaker John Wyver, who in a lecture entitled ‘Home Truths,’ lambasted many of his fellow documentarians and traced what he saw as their lack of imaginative daring back to that same Grierson tradition.

He was particularly critical of the narrative-led observational film and encouraged his somewhat restless audience to pay more attention to essayists like Chris Marker, or visual stylists like British filmmaker Michael Grigsby.

Wyver’s comments were to be echoed by another guest speaker, Brian Winston, who argued that the realist tradition was in critical condition, suffering from creative exhaustion and failings in the original, so to speak, software.

Winston also took issue with the much quoted ‘creative treatment of actuality’ definition, arguing that there was little actuality left after the filmmaker had creatively treated it!

Exhausted by all this theorizing, the delegates could, however, take time out to view an extraordinary range of documentary films from around the world and to meet with many of the filmmakers.

Acclaimed Brazilian director Eduardo Coutinho introduced several of his films: Boca De Lixo (The Scavengers), which examines the lives of people who live off Rio’s waste heaps, and Santa Marta: Duas Semanos no Morro (Santa Marta: Two Weeks in the Slums).

Also from Brazil, filmmaker Sergio Goldenberg was on hand for a screening of Funk Rio, a street-wise, verite portrait of Rio’s funkateers.

Dutch director Dree Andrea described the extraordinary five-year history of her film The Tunnel, a study of a group of tramps living in a disused New York railway tunnel.

From Sarajevo, there was feature director Vesna Ljubic’s haunting Ecce Homo, a visual essay that reflects the constant threat of death in that ravaged city.

Tales From A Hard City, a raw and compulsive study of a group of Gen Xers in contemporary Sheffield blurs the boundaries between documentary and drama in a very un-Griersonian manner, as does the brilliantly inventive short The Secret, directed by Claire Kilner.

Canada was represented by Ali Kazimi’s multiple award-winning Narmada: A Valley Rises and the National Film Board production, The Lucky Ones: Allied Airmen at Buchenwald.