Programme

One of the goals that Documenta Madrid has always made for itself is to bring documentary film to a broad spectrum of the population (and it appears to be doing so: every year there are more and more spectators). However, there is still one score left to settle: to get those involved who seem to be absent from the most of the public at documentary festivals: the young people. It is this very absence that has inspired Documenta 07 to create this section, which proposes to bring this kind of film to those places that up to now have been somewhat distant from the festival, the classrooms. Since Mohammed isn’t going to the mountain, it will be the mountain that will go to Mohammed.

It is not the first time images are used in school and high schools as an educational tool, as can be seen by textbooks, where images are used as more than just a complement to the written word. Nevertheless, we believe documentary film in particular is a magnificent window to other worlds, ones not necessarily distant in space and/or time (though they occasionally are), but that are always different from those we already know. While this film includes a wide variety of formats, from purely informative discourse to total experimentation, a great deal of the documentaries continue to favor the idea of building up a reflection on social reality, thus encouraging the creation of a critical viewpoint in the spectator.

It is precisely this capacity for surprising and furthering knowledge that we have taken into account when selecting which documentary film to offer the students. And we have chosen An Inconvenient Truth(Davis Guggenheim, 2006) for several reasons. This film grants us the possibility of getting to the bottom of a problem that has proven to be a pressing one in recent years: global warming. While decades ago this subject matter was hardly dealt with in educational (and political) programs, it is now one of the key themes in school. This film, which last February won the Oscar for Best Documentary, provides a great deal of information about the current state of this issue by the figure of Al Gore, a politician who (after his controversial defeat at the hands of his Republican rival George W. Bush) has redirected his career toward the condemnation of the current situation of the environment. By using strategies of representation that are common in documentary language, such as maps and animation (of course, using the latest technology), this feature film offers a broad view of the problem, and most importantly, offers possible solutions the students will be able to put into practice. In addition, the film is ideally suited for them to learn about one of the most common types of documentary language (the informative news program) and it prepares them for future encounters with this film genre.

We hope this initiative manages to attract this part of the population, one that is often left in the margins of the festival circuits, and that it generates interest for a type of film that, despite its abundance in media like television, still remains unknown for a great number of people, especially those who regularly go to the classrooms.

Laura Gómez Vaquero
Film Scholar

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Davis Guggenheim
DVD / 100' / 2006 / USA

The Al Gore´s crusade to halt global warming, exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. The film brings home the former Vice President Al Gore´s argument that we can no longer afford to view global warming as a political issue -rather, it is the biggest moral challenges facing our civilization.

C. P. Antonio de Nebrija
C. P. Rufino Blanco
I. E. S. Emperatriz mª de Austria
I. E. S. Pío Baroja
I. E. S. San Juan Bautista