The London International Documentary Festival

Jessie Teggin and Patrick Hazard, programmers of the London International Documentary Festival, guide us through the event, which starts this weekend

We selected this year’s programme from films from more than 90 countries. Often they were made under difficult conditions within limited budgets, and the final 80 films engage with a broad range of subjects: human rights, the environment, military and political conflicts, the clash of old and new. We didn’t programme the festival to a theme: we were interested in seeing what stories the filmmakers were drawn to and what themes emerged.

The festival is an opportunity to support documentaries and to promote a different experience of viewing them. Watching documentaries as part of a theatre audience rather than on television, in private, opens up the possibility for direct engagement.

As viewers, we rarely get a chance to respond immediately. Through interviews with directors, panel discussions and ‘conversations’, there is a chance to go beyond the films themselves, offering the opportunity for the viewer to respond to and question the films and extend the lives of the stories they tell. What stands out are delicate explorations of individual lives, communities and campaigns.

The stories of the women in both ‘La Americana’ (Renoir, Mar 29), about a Bolivian working illegally in America, and ‘Next Station’ (British Museum, Apr 5), following a group of Ecuadorean immigrants in Madrid who were forced to leave their children to seek work abroad, are heard through their own testimonies.

Many of the films call for debate. ‘Peace with Seals’ (British Museum, Apr 5) looks in a humorous way at the deeply troubling, changing relations between humans, their environment and animals. A discussion with the director and representatives from Greenpeace and Plane Stupid will follow the screening. ‘Aching Heart’ (Barbican, Apr 1) follows a group of young Muslim men and questions why an increasing number of them are preparing to bring holy war to the European countries of their birth.

The discussion will bring together the director Oscar Hedin and Munir Zamir, a counterterrorism consultant and advisor to the Muslim Contact Unit of the Metropolitan Police.

The value of a documentary film is often its immediacy and relevance to a news story. The world premiere of ‘The Unwinking Gaze’ (Prince Charles Cinema, Mar 29), observes the painstaking efforts of the Dalai Lama to engage the Chinese in negotiations towards what he calls the ‘meaningful autonomy’ of Tibet. Meanwhile, ‘Meeting Resistance’ (British Museum, Apr 5), the Golden Award-winner at the last Al Jazeera International Film Festival, is the unbroadcast story of the Iraq conflict filmed with unprecedented access to so-called ‘insurgents’.

It’s not all news. Inevitably, stories of everyday life throw up everyday humour, and even the most minimal of settings can produce an epic outcome. There is drama in the most unexpected places. Documentary films sometimes seem opposed to imagination, but it is the imagination they fire up when they help us to see the world through different eyes.

The London International Documentary Festival is at various venues Mar 29 to Apr 5.

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