49th Festival dei Popoli: Instruction for use!
Florence’s People Festival, or Festival dei Popoli, is a long-established international event held at a number of venues, offering a rich programme of film documentaries on contemporary topics.A broad panorama of documentary cinema explores people and their countries, portraits of men and women and stories from all over the globe.
By encouraging debate and confrontation, analysis and dialogue, the festival allows for public interaction with experts in the field, including film-makers and key personalities in showbiz.
Paying tribute to Nanook of the North, a 1922 silent documentary film by Robert J Flaherty, the 2008 edition is entitled “Nanook’s Legacy” and offers an insight into the development of the genre.
The Programme:
Along with its plans to meet the new goals, the 49th edition of the Festival dei Popoli will kick things off with a roundtable discussion, Nanook’s Legacy, which will ask international participants (filmmakers, producers, critics and festival directors) to reflect on the state of the documentary and how the term coined by Grierson in his paper on Flaherty’s film no longer corresponds to the same thing, inasmuch as the focus of nonfiction film has shifted to employ other forms.
Such a transformation will be made more evident by the retrospective A Baltic Diagonal, which takes a look at the last forty years of documentary production in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (the idea is to examine the evolution of this cinematic form from a technical and linguistic revolution—live cinema—to that of digital technology, covering an arc of time equivalent to the festival’s). The retrospective will highlight the personalities in the Works of Claire Simon, a filmmaker who alternates documentary and fiction with intriguing, effecting structural and linguistic hybrids; and the series The Faces of Power, which showcases numerous titles in the history of cinema in order to examine the cinematic representation of power.
Along the same lines, the two competitions are the International Competition, made up of twenty-four films that depict the look and spirit of the world; and the Free Style Competition, consisting of twenty films that experiment with documentary form.
