Sheffield Doc/Fest is UK’s biggest documentary festival welcoming 32,700+ visitors each year, including more than 3,500 industry professionals from over 60 countries. In addition to the rich and diverse film screening program, the festival offers tons of great events dedicated to the innovation, craft and business of the documentary industry. Attended by many archival producers and researchers, the topic of archive footage use will be featured in the screening program, in addition to several talks. We’ve prepared a quick guide highlighting everything dedicated to archives at this year’s festival.
documentary festival
SPOTLIGHT: 4 Archive-Driven Documentaries @ HotDocs2018
We have prepared for you a short selection of films from this year’s edition of HotDocs that we expect to showcase some of the best work in the field of archive research in 2018. With the full line-up published, it was easy to spot the productions that rely on the meticulous research of both personal and external archive sources. Some of the productions will have their World/North American premieres making the festival a truly special moment for the filmmakers and researchers behind them. The selected films come from very different places, periods, each with a unique personal narrative making a great complete watching experience if you want to see all of them (something that we definitely will).
SPOTLIGHT: 5 Documentaries from the “For Another ’68” Retrospective @ Cinéma du Réel 2018
For its 40th edition, this year’s Cinéma du Réel is bringing a fascinating retrospective on documentaries from 1968 in attempt to “deconstruct the mythology” surrounding this crucial moment in history. The year of 1968 stirred a lot of cultural and social uprising all around the world. One of the most powerful mediums reflecting those events of massive shifts in human society was cinema. Thanks to a number of young and bold artists today we have now not only a better understanding of that period but also in some of the cases extremely valuable sources of archives of the radical changes happening in places like Palestine, Mexico, Cuba, India, Eastern Europe. Rare and immediate depictions like those can sometimes prove to be unusual sources for archive footage. They can serve as a unique way cover very particular moments and places that made part of global historical processes and social movements. These are also films that can be regarded as a great proof for the powerful wave of creativity that swept a whole generation of filmmakers. In the words of the curator behind the selection, Federico Rossin: ”A social uprising always elicits on a revolution of artistic forms: we consider ’68 as the generator of the most radical and innovative documentary cinema”.