We're looking at hybrids between barely visible fiction and classic documentary - made up of archive footage, interviews and historical re-enactments. This new type of documentary does not claim to cover all sides of a truth, but focuses on just one of them. In abandoning the search for an indisputable truth, the documentary genre thus frees itself from the reins and, in this hybrid form, lyricism becomes controlled fabulation.
The directors of Dogwatch (d. Gregoris Rentis, Greece/France) and The Outliers (d. Raphaël Mathié, France), while carefully constructing protagonists’ interactions and dialogues, manage to grasp the rhythm of life at sea and of life in isolation on a mountaintop well enough to maintain the effect of a 'classic' documentary, despite manipulating the content of the film.
Crows Are White (d. Ahsen Nadeem, USA) draws a parallel between the contradictions of the Muslim religion and finding one’s loved one, and the contradictions between truth and fiction within the documentary itself. The title of the documentary is a demonstration of having faith in something that is untrue, a belief that every Buddhist monk in Japan must have in order to continue a life of hardships in the temple. The same unwavering faith helped Justo Gallego Martínez to build a cathedral – all by himself and lacking any sort of studies.
The documentary The Cathedral (d. Denis Dobrovoda, Slovakia/Spain) paints the portrait of a man labelled as a madman, but who could also be considered a saint in today's world. Anhell69 (d. Theo Montoya, Colombia / Romania) is a fiction turned documentary about a generation that bathes in carnal pleasures and blood from Colombia's past and present.
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (d. Anna Hints, Estonia / France / Iceland) interweaves the pains and joys of a group of women with the intimacy of a cathartic ritual. Introducing a protagonist as vulnerable as those in the Estonian documentary, The Land You Belong (d. Elena Rebeca Carini, Italy / Romania) delves into the life of a woman who, adopted at the age of 6 months, returns to her homeland to find the unknown pieces of her identity.
Like an Island (d. Tizian Büchi, Switzerland), a documentary about fearing the Other and the possibility of them bringing harm to European society, is structured as a fable with magical-realistic elements. In a residential neighbourhood of a Swiss town, an “unknown evil” is brought by the river that flows through the area. The two protagonists, immigrants themselves, are hired to secure the riverbed and prevent the locals from approaching an unseen and unknown danger.
The documentary Knit's Island (d. Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, Quentin L'helgoualc'h, France) takes place in a virtual environment, where the three filmmakers explore the strangeness of interactions with a community of Day Z video game players. 100 Seasons (d. Giovanni Bucchieri, Sweden) is the filmmaker's pretext for dealing with the trauma of separating from his great love. Using fictional scenes, the film allows the love between the two former ballet dancers to be given more time than life has actually given them.