Our objective continues to be the same as the one that encouraged us at the beginning: to offer, not so much the “reality” in which the citizens live – reality always is better than any interpretation however deep it may be- but rather the set of perceptions through which those same citizens find their place in a difficult, varied and complex world. In this sense, the accumulated experience throughout the first two years has led us to insist on two values which, in some way, we feel have been consolidated through Docusur and which now we are beginning to defend as Miradas-Doc.
In the first place, the real interest that there is all over the world in recounting the events of the human being in the most varied territories and problems. This phenomenon, which we might call a real “multiplication of memory” – deriving from the democratisation of technical resources – has made it possible to shape a new sense of history centred on the exponential progression of the mechanisms through which the events are preserved. This increase in memory – of that which can be memorised, of the visible- should lead us necessarily to an increase of consciousness and of interpretation of the world to which the citizens can gain access. The more than a thousand documentaries that we have received at each of the past festivals make this an exceptional vantage point of that multiple reality that is the contemporary world, and which enable us to wish that each one of the editions of Miradas-Doc should become a fiesta for citizenship.
In the second place, we believe that the contents of Miradas-Doc, by moving the foci in which the images are produced from the centres of formation of consensus in the West towards the protagonists themselves, may modify the ways of thinking from which relationships between North and South, between West and East or between the rich and the poor are generally interpreted. Miradas-Doc wishes to offer a direct vision, which is personal and very different from that which we are generally given by western media, and therefore it incorporates a far from negligible quantity of unprocessed information which surprises audiences with its vitality, its freshness and its desire for progress. The image that people have of Arab countries, of sub-Saharan Africa or of the immigration towards the first world, in order to give three very different examples, varies in a very positive fashion by means of a visit to our festival. The energy, the will power and the hope of the citizens of the developing countries surprises and invigorates the western view. It is not therefore a matter of an event with hard or uncomfortable content but, as our audiences have agreed in the two editions that have been held, a space for hope, opportunity and the best knowledge of the world. In this regard, we believe that we can state that Miradas-Doc is not so much a festival as a very useful tool for offering material and consistency in the interpretation of reality, whether ordinary or exceptional, of the beings who inhabit this planet.
Miradas-Doc brings together five different yet complementary events. The festival itself, with an official section made up of the international, national and Canarian prizes and a number of informative sections grouped around the labels of Cinemateca Sur, in which it is hoped to make a tour of national film-making of the three above-mentioned continents -, “Personal Retrospective” – a tribute to the career of a director (Patricio Guzmán in the first and Basilio Martín in the second), and a thematic display, “Documentary Topicality” which, as its name indicates, reflects on an aspect of the latest developments in documentary cinema in the world.
The second event brought together at Miradas-Doc in order of importance is probably Miradas-Doc Market, a space for the distribution of documentary cinema from the third world in the first, through the presence at Guía de Isora of purchasers from the main public and private channels of the first world. THE miradasDOC market has screening sessions – for productions that are already complete – and pitching sessions, for giving support to projects that are under way. This is the only European market exclusively devoted to this kind of cinema.
The documentary workshops of Miradas-Doc have also been highly successful. The festival offers, each year, three workshops for students and professionals of audiovisual work. A theoretical and a practical workshop make up the “open” proposal of training during Miradas-Doc. These workshops have a total duration of twenty hours, and are taught by professionals with a substantial career and prestige. What is more, there is a workshop to which you can only gain access by invitation, Doc Express, in which teams made up by the image and sound schools of the Canary Islands – and from outside the islands – must film a documentary of up to five minutes in length during the seven days of the festival.
During the whole week of the Miradas-Doc Festival, conferences, round tables, talks and discussions are held with the main guests at the competition as well as parallel activities such as open-air cinema, concerts and workshops related with the themes of the festival. All of this makes up the “Foro de las Miradas” (the Forum of the Gaze), in which very varied questions are raised about current affairs, the documentary genre and the role of the cinema in its relations with what happens.