A few words written for this year’s Hot Docs programme book….
I bid you to a one-man revolution -
The only revolution that is coming.
- Robert Frost, from “Build Soil: A Political Pastoral”
“If we find the consequences of our arrogant ignorance to be humbling, and we are humbled, then we have at hand the first fact of hope: We can change ourselves. We, each of us severally, can remove our minds from the corporate ignorance and arrogance that is leading the world to destruction; we can honestly confront our ignorance and our need; we can take guidance from the knowledge we most authentically possess, from experience, from tradition, and from inward promptings of affection, conscience, decency, compassion, even inspiration.” – Wendell Berry, from “The Way of Ignorance”
It is impossible to watch several hundred documentaries, as our programmers each have done over the past few months, and not feel that the state of things, in the broadest sense, are bad. Very bad. Yet, I agree with Wendell Berry, a prolific, wise writer of poetry, fiction and essays, and for over forty years a farmer in Henry County, Kentucky: “If the ability to change oneself is the first fact of hope, then the second surely must be an honest assessment of the badness of the situation.”
Anybody who has been following documentary over the past decade knows that assessing and confronting badness is something our nonfiction filmmakers approach with gusto. They don’t flinch. They commonly take on difficult subjects and often travel to dangerous places. Sometimes those places are within their own communities, or their families, or their selves (more so then ever in this year’s Festival).
Those of us who have championed and promoted documentary over this period of the flourishing of the form, which has flirted with something like popular appeal, often downplay the more difficult, consumer unfriendly, subject matter that is at the core of the movement. Isn’t going to the movies supposed to be a vacation from reality? Continue reading…