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

Professor of art history, journalist and film critic. Antonio Maiorino is a member of the SNCCI (National Union of Italian Film Critics). After several collaborations with art magazines, both online and in print (Artribune, ArtsLife, Lobodilattice, InArte), he has written mainly about cinema, among others for Sentieri Selvaggi, Ondacinema, Cabiria and Cinema Errante, as well as having edited a weekly cinema column in the daily newspaper Cronache di Salerno. For the Faito Doc Festival, since 2013, he has worked as presenter, selector and currently as curator of the Doc Now! section, which he founded in 2021 as a permanent investigation laboratory on the cinema of reality. For years he has also directed film columns on radio and participated in film festival juries. He currently writes, mostly freelance, for Taxidrivers, CineCriticaWeb, Infooggi (where he founded the cinema page in 2011), alternating reviews with international interviews from various festivals.

Fourth edition in 2024

THEME: At the roots of documentary

The 2024 edition of Doc Now!, aligning itself in line with the festival’s annual theme, will in its own way
the investigation into the cinema of reality and documentary filmmaking by talking about roots. Can a cinema such as that of Palestinian
Michel Khleifi be so rooted as to become radical? How did Mattia Colombo and Valentina Cicogna
told the rootless bodies of the award-winning documentary Sconosciuti puri? Stories of rootedness and uprooting
will be the backdrop for the audience’s ‘participatory interview’: starting with clips, images and audio-visual contributions, the
spectators, moderated by Antonio Maiorino, will interview the guest filmmakers, to continue the permanent enquiry into the
ramifications, of form and content, of the cinema of the real in the third millennium.

GUESTS
Michel Khleifi and his film work. It will start with the film Noces en Galilée, winner of the Critics’ Prize at
Cannes in 1987. Ma’loul fête sa destruction will also be screened during the window dedicated to Palestine.
Mattia Colombo and Valentina Cicogna, winners of the Interreligious Award at the Festival Visions du Réel à Nyon with
Sconosciuti puri? (2023).

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.