Programme

Reel News and Camcorder Guerrillas are teaming up to offer a video activist workshop during Document Film Festival. This short workshop aims to equip participants with the know-how needed to make their own short films and distribute them online. Course participants will explore ideas around local issues, political and community campaigning and citizen journalism.

We will cover the very basics of how to plan, film, edit and upload films to YouTube and share them using social networks, using basic camcorders, iPads, mobile phones or still cameras with widely available computer software such as iMovie. No special computer skills or previous filming experience is required.

12 participants places available.

The training will be led by members of Camcorder Guerrillas and Reel News video activist collectives.

This workshop is presented in association with GRAMNet.

János Orsós is of Romani descent, a teacher, and a Buddhist. Inspired by the history of the Dalits or “untouchables” in India, birthplace of both Romani culture and Buddhism, he founded a school in a small Hungarian village with the goal of enabling teenagers from the poorest Romani ghettos to attend universities. Angry Buddha documents János’ resolute battle against the difficulties he faces over three years, while simultaneously painting affectionate yet honest portraits of the Romani youth who use humour and their own vitality to survive in a world of poverty and prejudice.

Photographer and filmmaker Chris Leslie is widely acknowledged as the most consistent chronicler of the Glasgow’s recent history, which has seen the skyline of the city radically transformed as high rise tower blocks have been blown down and bulldozed. 30% of the city’s high rise flats have disappeared since 2006. With the regeneration of the Commonwealth Games, does this disappearing Glasgow herald a renaissance in the city?

On Wednesday night, Chris will give an illustrated talk for Document on the human impact of these profound changes. Featuring several of his short films, Chris will finish his talk with a chance to see his latest film (Re)Imagining Glasgow, chronicling Glasgow’s regeneration over the past forty years. The film playfully reworks Oscar Marzaroli’s 1970 film Glasgow 1980 and uses previously unseen footage shot by Marzaroli for an uncompleted follow-up film, Glasgow’s Progress, alongside new footage of Glasgow today.

This event is free but ticketed.

The Fest of Duty is a religious ceremony designed to instil Islamic beliefs and values in girls when they reach the age of nine. This film follows two adolescent cousins as they transition into adulthood eight years after their official Fest of Duty, and observes the divergent impact of religious doctrine on the public and private lives of two teenage girls who come to symbolize the conflicting cultural values in Iran today.

Document is proud to host the latest in a series of masterclasses presented by Scottish Documentary Institute, allowing audiences to learn from world-class filmmakers as they discuss their practice. This year, we’re joined by George Amponsah and Dionne Walker, director and producer of acclaimed British film The Hard Stop – a cinematic, hybrid documentary that explores the complicated intersections of race and class that underpin the still-unresolved killing of Mark Duggan in 2011.

“At least a third of The Hard Stop is shot with a Z1 camcorder that still used tape,” Amponsah explains. “It taught me that all you have to have is a bit of heart and belief in what you’re doing and to just get to it.”

Join us for the calm before the storm as we kick back for a relaxed Southside preview of the festival, including a screening of Michael Graversen’s Dreaming of Denmark – there will be cinema and food aplenty.

This event is free and unticketed!

In New York City, LGBTQ youth-of-colour gather out on the Christopher Street Pier, practicing a performance-based artform, Ballroom, made famous in the early 1990s by Madonna’s music video Vogue and the documentary Paris Is Burning. 25 years after these cultural touchstones, a new and very different generation of LGBTQ youth have formed an artistic activist subculture – the Kiki Scene. Kiki follows seven characters from the Kiki community over the course of four years, using their preparations and spectacular performances at events known as Kiki balls as a framing device while delving into their battles with homelessness, illness and prejudice as well as their gains towards political influence and the conquering of affirming gender-expressions.

Presented in association with Glitch Film Festival.

We will be joined after the screening for a Q&A with Twiggy Pucci Garçon, Kiki co-writer and Kiki “gatekeeper”.

Festival programmers reveal growing tensions and anxiety associated with their role in fact-checking the truthfulness of the documentary films they select. With the growing diversity of documentary forms of expression, the question becomes ever more urgent: who should have the responsibility of the claims presented as true in documentary films at festivals and how are these aspects negotiated by festivals and their stakeholders? This event will raise questions and invite answers from festival programmers, filmmakers, community/activist organisations and audiences alike in the form of a critical forum that follows the Scottish premiere of the feature documentary A Brilliant Genocide by Ebony Butler.

This event is free and unticketed.

Activist and The Abominable Crime subject Maurice Tomlinson in conversation with Matthew Waites, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow.

Maurice Tomlinson is a Jamaican lawyer, gay rights activist, and educator. He acts as counsel and/or claimant in cases challenging anti-gay laws before the most senior tribunals in the Caribbean and authors reports to regional and UN agencies on the human rights situation for LGBTI people in this region.

From 2009 to 2011, Maurice taught a variety of law courses at the University of Technology in Jamaica, including discrimination law. He was outed as a gay man in 2011, soon after filing a lawsuit against Jamaica’s anti-sodomy laws and was forced to flee his native country for Toronto, Canada where he is now a senior policy analyst with the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. Maurice received the inaugural David Kato Vision and Voice Award, which recognizes individuals who defend human rights and the dignity of LGBTI people around the world.

The conversation will focus particularly on Maurice’s experiences as represented in the film, both personally and as a lawyer, activist and educator.  In particular discussion will focus on Maurice’s groundbreaking legal action against Jamaica’s criminalisation of same-sex sexual behaviour.  This will be discussed in the context of a recent regionally groundbreaking ruling in Belize, and wider debates over national and transnational strategies for claiming human rights in the context of postcolonial power relations.

Matthew Waites is co-editor, with Corinne Lennox, of the open access volume Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Commonwealth: Struggles for Decriminalisation and Change (School of Advanced Study, 2013), which includes two chapters covering Jamaica that discuss legal and activist strategies in postcolonial contexts (online here).  He is a co-founder of Glasgow Human Rights Network and an Associate Director of Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, organisations supporting this event.

This event is free and unticketed.

Tehran, June 2013. Iranians are preparing to elect the new President of the Islamic Republic. Massed in front of their TV, they comment on the presidential campaign broadcast by national channels. The jokes that accompany the parade of candidates betray the spectator’s disappointment. After the 2009 riots, do the Iranian people still believe in politics? In the privacy of their homes, facing the images relayed by satellite feed, state propaganda, images of the West, Egypt or Syria, women and men freely talk about their hopes, their anger and their fears.

In October 2008, Iceland was hit with one of the biggest financial disasters any nation in the world had experienced. In response, citizens took to the streets creating what is now known as the “Pots and Pans Revolution”. Following widespread media silence and a growing global trend towards people-led movements, this documentary explores how and why the people of Iceland resisted the measures imposed by their government following the crisis of 2008 and how they forced their government to resign in an attempt to forge a new political path.

We will be joined after the screening for a Q&A with director Danny Mitchell.

The Abominable Crime is the story Simone, a young lesbian single mother who survives a brutal anti-gay shooting and Maurice, Jamaica’s leading human-rights activist, who is outed shortly after filing a lawsuit challenging his country’s anti-sodomy law. Simone must choose between hiding with her daughter in Jamaica in constant fear for their lives or escaping alone to seek safety and asylum abroad. Maurice, meanwhile, escapes to Canada, and then risks everything to return to continue his activism.

Please join us in the Creative Lab following the screening for Maurice Tomlinson: In Conversation.

A documentary that reflects on the 2011 killing of Mark Duggan, a young, black, British man, at the hands of London’s Metropolitan Police. Duggan was pulled over by police early one morning, and minutes later, was shot dead. This event sparked the now-infamous Tottenham riots and made headlines around the globe, but, as so often happens, the issue soon dropped from the news reports. Picking up the story where the media left off, George Amponsah’s documentary The Hard Stop brings it back to its roots in Duggan’s neighbourhood, following his friends Marcus and Kurtis as they fight for justice and search for meaning, while struggling against ongoing discrimination in their daily lives.

We will be joined after the screening for a Q&A with director George Amponsah and producer Dionne Walker.

By turns tender and disturbing, the new film from Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini is a powerful docu-fiction hybrid that profiles drug addicts and militia members living on the fringes of society. Throughout, Minervini coaxes his subjects to reveal themselves with a disarming directness, through a mix of direct observation, collaborative dramaturgy and dexterous cinematic technique. The Other Side is a hypnotic, raw and often provocative paean to the American B-side and to complex notions of freedom and security.

A young freedom fighter and a KGB officer both grew up in the Soviet era, and yet made life-changing decisions. Today they are contemplating their past. A dissident’s wife, after many years waiting for her husband to return from a psychiatric prison, tries to fill the abyss of his memory by helping him to tell their story. A writer in the underground press, after being sentenced to seven years of Siberian exile, decides to meet his former interrogator for a cup of coffee. A collector of antiques was arrested in a hotel in Vilnius and kept in isolation for nine months. Thirty years later, he comes back to the same hotel to look for answers. When We Talk About KGB consists of heart-breaking stories, shadowed by grief of Soviet crimes and euphoria over the victory of Lithuanian freedom.