30 APRIL / 10 MAY

SECTIONS // PARALLEL CYCLE

A DOUBLE VIEW

The hackneyed expression "based on a true story" can often be seen in the opening credits of feature films, maybe as a way of legitimising the importance of the contents: a way of spelling out that it's more than just mere entertainment bubbling up from the scriptwriter's imagination, but rather material taken from the world around us, which should make it more valuable. But it can also be a defence against the excesses of life, which sometimes, surpasses the most frenzied imagination of the creators of plots and characters. Any scriptwriter knows that truth isn't always realistic and that realism isn't necessarily true. Documentary films for their part have always aspired to work with reality through primary sources, without the filter of the fictional recreation, and have often discovered that the heterogeneity and richness of this material doesn't adhere to the limits imposed by the rules of plot construction and to a three act structure with easy to understand characters. When the same event is used within fiction and documentary film, these images face each other in a mirror which can tell us a great deal not only about the event itself, but also the possibilities of its representation, its potential to be worked from different points of view and the multiplicity of views which the perception of a unique event can produce. The film cycle A Double View aims to investigate this problematic relationship between an event and the way it is presented. In this group of films, the story structure based on characters with aims and motivations which characterises fictional cinema is enriched by the disperse mosaic of memories and archive images; the bread and butter of documentary film. Or to put it another way, the desire to organise human existence into a coherent narrative comes face to face with the realization of its complexity and contradictions.

Roberto Cueto
Programmer of Cineteca and member of the selection committee for DocumentaMadrid