Forum 2014
One of the most charismatic theorists of cinema, André Bazin, in his praise of the Italian neo-realism, told us what cinema would be capable of: a kind of search for a mystery of the real. Admittedly, his emphasis was also the technical devices by proposing the preponderance of the sequence-shot and minimization of the importance of the montage. In any case, Bazin's realism placed in the center of film theory a need to hybridize fiction and documentary, and vice-versa. The director is not so much a technical expert, but an actor in his own world.
We know, in the cinematographic common sense, than any fiction film is a document of a shooting (Hollywood classical period shows a certain worldview of America, as well as, for example, in two opposite cases, Wong Kar Wai films show us Hong Kong or Mike Leigh's show us London, both in the 90s). On the other hand, the documentary film ever mustered the tools of fiction and, to prove it, we can just quote the foundational example of the genre: "Nanook of the North" (1922), by Robert Flaherty, where many of the scenes are staged by the director.
Contemporary cinema has taken a growing hybridization between documentary and fiction, as evidenced by authors as diverse as Pedro Costa, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Nicolás Pereda or Joshua Oppenheimer. The forum presented here intends to discuss, in this context, how film works the real. We assume here Bazin's "mystery of the real", understanding, therefore, that it is not a pre-defined objective (to find the real), but surround it, see how we can get closer to the world. We can only achieve it if apostrophize us with the question - Where is Real? - even though we will never fully know the answer.