Doc Now !

Doc Now!

Doc Now! is the new section of the Faito Doc Festival that aims to listen to the voices of the most important contemporary directors for a permanent workshop on documentary and cinema of reality.
Interviews, live and online, to unite the public and professionals in an uninterrupted and exciting cinematic investigation.
Cinema has always been changing. Never the same, despite the ups and downs.
To those who observe it now – from the point of view of the director, the critic or the simple spectator – a metamorphosis is offered to the eye: the transition of the documentary into the so-called cinema of reality. If we imagine the documentary and fiction as the antipodes of a cinema territory, we could tell, in the last twenty years, about the attraction of opposites: the documentary that is enriched by invention, by the imaginative, by the non-real; fiction that is substantiated by an extreme realism, by people instead of characters, by true stories.

Like Tarkovsky’s stalker in the Zone, Doc Now! wants to take us to this place of narration, with its uncertain and shaky borders, where does the documentary go?

And in the meantime: good revolution (maybe), dear documentary.

Antonio Maiorino

Born in 1984, film critic and journalist, member of the National Union of Film Critics, Antonio Maiorino has survived for years, fortunately, as a professor of art history. He has occasionally written about art (Artribune, ArtsLife, Lobodilattice, InArte); often about cinema (Sentieri Selvaggi, Ondacinema, Cabiria, Cinema Errante); sometimes acted as a pioneer (founding the Cinema per Infoggi category in 2011; co-founding and directing La Città Incantata Film Festival in Nocera Inferiore for 7 years). Today he interviews directors from all over the world for Taxi Drivers, a historic film webzine directed by Enrico Magrelli.

Third edition in 2023

For the third consecutive year, the young but fierce and, hopefully, long-lived section of the festival shares with the public and insiders its permanent enquiry on the documentary film of the third millennium, moving between reality and fiction along its mobile borders and in its territories of proximity: where does the cinema of reality go?
In the 2023 edition we are not moving far: we are staying in the family. Connecting organically to the festival’s annually chosen theme, that of diversity, Doc Now! develops its exploration of the real by moving from films that narrate, through the documentary format, the family context as belonging, but also alienation; as closeness, but also the discovery of detachment. How does one film the family?
Here, then, is an authentic family day: over the course of a few hours, the audience will be able to ask Firouzeh Khosrovani questions about Radiograph of a Family, winner of the 2022 edition; immerse themselves in the secret rooms of Chiara Marotta‘s family with a viewing of Il momento di passaggio, which won prizes at the Solinas and Torino Film Festivals; lose themselves in the linguistic diversity of Mia Ma‘s family with Riz Cantonais, a film that has won several awards. All in the presence of the authors; all as film critics, but finally – as at the Faito Doc Festival – as family.

Cantonese Rice

by Mia Ma | 2015 | France | 50′

I don’t speak three words of Cantonese because my father never spoke it to me and I’m terrible at it. My grandmother doesn’t speak three words of French because she’s never wanted to learn it. My father translates for me, but he’s reluctant to do it. So I meet other Chinese immigrants, with different languages and backgrounds. Thanks to these detours, the loss of the original language gradually makes sense.

IL MOMENTO DI PASSAGGIO

by Chiara Marotta | 2021 | Italy | 68′

A family, in a religious community, and a daughter who is no longer part of it. Then a new world to inhabit and a home to leave behind. These are all pieces of the life of the author, who returns home after a period of being away to deal with unresolved issues together with her grandmother, mother, and sister. Is it possible to be a family without sharing the same values? Is it possible to accept each other?

Second edition in 2022

Doc Now! returns to the Faito Doc Festival, after its debut in the 2021 edition, to continue its investigation into the documentary and the cinema of the real. Listening to the most qualified authorial voices of the contemporary scene, through live and online interviews, the section renews its commitment to establish itself as a permanent laboratory on the frayed boundaries between reality, reality, fiction, invention, imagination. Together with the public and insiders, the journey into the territory of the documentary continues in order to grasp the topography of the third millennium and its unpredictable deviations.

In the often overt mingling of reality and fiction, which characterises (not only) contemporary documentaries, it no longer makes sense, perhaps, to speak of flights of fancy. Not even for those documentaries that deliberately resort to fantasy, whimsy, the unreal. In addition to immersion, the documentary seems to live, in film narration, on constant escapism: even more true than true, a film is a lie.

By talking in a participatory interview with Marilyn Watelet (director and historical producer of Chantal Akerman) and with Olga Lucovnicova (Golden Bear at Berlin 2021 with the short My Uncle Tudor), the public of the 15th edition of the Faito Doc Festival will be able to discover how much evasion from reality and how much adherence to reality there is in the documentary.

Interview Chiara Marotta – Director of “Il momento di passaggio”

First edition in 2021

In the 2021 edition, Firouzeh Khosrovani, whose marvellous Radiograph of a Family, awarded at the IDFA 2020, tried to answer this question by going through a metamorphosis within a metamorphosis: that of his own family in the Iran of the Islamic Revolution.

Born in Tehran in 1971, she currently lives and works between Iran, Spain and Italy.
In Italy, she graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 2002. In 2004 she obtained a master’s degree in journalism in Tehran. She made her debut as a documentary filmmaker by writing the subject and collaborating on the photography of the documentary Behesht-e Zahra (Mother of Martyrs) on the Iran-Iraq war. He collaborated with the Italian Red Cross in Bam, the city hit by the 2003 earthquake, and made a documentary on their psycho-social assistance centre project, Life Train (2004), broadcast on Italian and Iranian television. He collaborates for several Italian and Spanish newspapers (such as Il manifesto, Limes, Culturas, Repubblica). We recall his documentary Rough Cut, entitled Bodies of Crime.