Documentary Is Happening to Somebody Else?

During the war in former Yugoslavia, an Italian company organized "war safaris" in Bosnia. People were transported into the country to spend a week "experiencing authentic war conditions".

Last year, almost a dozen of films in different IDFA programs were dealing with the war in former Yugoslavia. Only three were made by the filmmakers from the region.

In summer 2002 I attended "Transit Zero" workshop in Sweden and noticed that all Swedish documentaries, except one that was fake, are dealing with topics and events taking place in other countries. When asked about the reason for that, I was told that Sweden is a boring country.

At recent IDFA festival, film about former Yugoslav president Milosevic attracted a lot of attention. Done by a very respected British author, the film is (at least in my opinion) rather superficial and even has factual errors.

Today, documentaries are putting a lot of emphasis on personal view of the filmmaker, even to the extend that "PV" became a must for pitching sessions. However, there is another development, which is "sending" more and more filmmakers to make films in foreign countries about the issues that they are not always very familiar with.

Of course, one could argue that this has been so from the very beginning of the documentary, "Nanook..." being only one of the first examples. Yes, this is true. But, in such cases we dealt mostly with anthropological documentary that had the function to research and describe, not necessary to understand cultures. Also, it was always understood that this is an outsider's view.

The problem is, at least in my view, that contemporary television, as a mayor financier of documentaries, is interested in quick responses to world-wide affairs with a – "Bosnia is out – Afghanistan is in" syndrome. So, "we need something – let's see whom we have – he did a good film in Israel, let's ask him to do something about Pakistan. Probably about children... Can she go to Algeria – but let's make it personal..."

Unfortunately, this is mostly happening in direction West–East. Yet, while there is (historically) some awareness about the North-South developments, East Europe has just recently become interesting "terrain".

There is almost nothing happening in the opposite direction. If east European filmmakers have an opportunity to work in the West, it mostly has to do with "their own" emigrants.

I am not naive to believe that this is something easy to resolve, if at all. It became more and more difficult to get films funded and people are obviously going for the themes that can be financed. It is also understandable that commissioning editors are more eager to employ people they know.

But, isn't this suppose to be one, united Europe?

I argued once with an art collector in USA that the phrase "Pre-Columbian" art is maybe not the most proper one. He didn't understand that. Then I asked him how would he feel if the whole Jewish history until 1935 was called "Pre-Hitler" era. No answer, either.

Nenad Puhovski