At yesterday’s opening ceremony, the Austrian director Ruth Beckermann received the DocumentaMadrid Award in recognition of her career. Also attending was the Barcelona-born filmmaker Carlos Casas, to whom the festival is also dedicating a far-reaching retrospective.

"To counter so much homogeneous and banal film, DocumentaMadrid takes the power of documentary film as a method with which to dismantle the audiovisual power systems that have become nearly the only form of contemporary sound and visual language," explained its directors David Varela and Andrea Guzmán in a jam-packed Sala Azcona during the presentation of the 16th edition of the festival promoted by the Madrid City Council.

Gonzalo de Pedro, artistic director of the Cineteca, stressed the importance of the festival's main venue: "our programming schedule begins every year with the celebration of DocumentaMadrid, work that continues and is gained from over the course of the year thanks to the networking with spaces within Matadero and with all the partner venues throughout the city.

The film Manu, directed by Emmanuelle Bonmariage, opened the 16th DocumentaMadrid International Documentary Film Festival in a jam-packed Sala Azcona.