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The Official Section is where the world's best documentary films not yet released in Spain will be competing against each other.
The latest Spanish documentary film will be premièred in Madrid as part of Panorama.
The retrospective of Carmen Cobos' career shows the work of this internationally acclaimed Spanish producer.
Festival venues:
Cineteca reopens its “pop-up” movie theatre, El Plató, to help the hosting of the programme.
Filmoteca will be hosting the cycle “A Double View".
The Canal + app, Yomvi, and the Filmin platform will enable audiences from outside Madrid to access some of the films presented at the Festival.
DocumentaMadrid is reactivating the digital platform for international coverage of Spanish documentary film that was set up last year in conjunction with ACE (Acción Cultural Española).
From 30 April to 10 May, DocumentaMadrid, dedicated exclusively to “cinema of the real”, opens its doors in CINETECA to offer the genre's top films produced this season from all over the world. More than 80 films (full-length and shorts) will be screened in the different auditoriums of this Madrid's prestigious cinema, which has become an icon of documentary film in Spain. The productions tackle the multiplicity of views of the same reality in a programme marked by contrasts. Eleven days of intense and high-quality “cinema of the real” in a festival promoted from Madrid City Council and organised by CINETECA, turning Madrid into the capital of documentary film for two weeks.
The Official Section, the multiple faces of reality
As every year, the Official Section will bring a carefully selected program including some of the major international productions of the year, to be premiered in Spain. A list of titles packed with contrasts to remind us that reality is never one-sided. We'll be seeing this in films like Virunga (nominated for an Academy Award and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio), in which the impressive and idyllic natural life of the national park is set against the harshness of endemic violence in Congo; or in The Look of Silence, the film shot from the victim's point of view and sequel to the grim The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, winner of DocumentaMadrid 2013 and the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature 2014.
Desde que el mundo es mundo, the only Spanish film in the Official Section, charts the unchanging nature of rural life as an alternative to the reality surrounding us in times of crisis; the return to our roots also paradoxically “saves” the Native Americans on a reserve in Minnesota in The Seventh Fire (presented by Terrence Malick, from executive producers Natalie Portman and Chris Eyre). And tradition shows its many facets in La Once (Tea Time), an ironic and subtle portrait of relationships in Chilean high society through a group of venerable old ladies.
The harshest version of reality paradoxically reaches us through the eyes of children in Something Better to Come, set in Moscow as its drifts into uncontrolled capitalism. Svalka, the world's biggest rubbish tip, is controlled by the Russian Mafia and is home to children growing up alone amongst the waste. Another side to Europe can be seen in the portrait of a marginalised adolescent in Drifter, as well as in the videos featured in Flotel Europa capturing the view of one out of hundreds of Bosnian children who have been sheltered for years in the limbo of a floating refuge centre.
Just like the loneliness and disappointment of Afghan soldiers in Tell The Spring Not To Come This Year, or of the American soldiers who served in Iraq depicted in Of Men and War. Those films highlight, once again, the futility of war and the paradox of invasion, reflected particularly in Censored Voices, through eye-witness accounts of Israeli military personnel who cannot understand why a persecuted people seeking freedom shall become the occupier: David turned Goliath. A similar contradiction is explored in Cartel Land, featuring people who opt for fighting drug cartel violence in armed “self-defence” groups, reproducing attitudes similar to the very ones they are trying to fight.
Facing all this, the entertaining and challenging view of famous American activists in The Yes Men are revolting, and the Jacques Demy-style musical documentary Chant ton BAC d’abord, in which a group of young people sing and narrate their passage from adolescence to adulthood, complete a competition that is sure to captivate all audiences.
Out of competition, and as the closing film, is Mother’s Wish, ten stories seen and told by women from all over the world, united by the subject of maternity.
The Official Section also presents 19 short films that will compete for the Best Short Documentary award.
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