Document Film Festival 2019 takes place from Thursday 24 to Sunday 27 October in CCA Glasgow, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow. CCA is a fully accessible venue and full information can be found on their website: https://www.cca-glasgow.com/about-cca/access-statement
Tickets to all events are either free or priced on a Pay What You Can basis from £0 to £8 (in £2 increments).
In order to make Document more accessible to those on a low income, we use a sliding scale ticket price for our events. You can choose what you pay based on your circumstances – you won’t be asked for any proof / ID, we just ask that you are honest!
For pre-booking online, tickets are available from £2 – £8, with free tickets available during the festival dates from our box office. If you would like to book a free ticket in advance, or make a group booking of free tickets, please feel free to get in touch via info@documentfilmfestival.org. Again, no proof is required.
—
Welcome to the seventeenth edition of Document.
Each year we foreground innovative documentary cinema as a way to explore and refresh our relationship to human rights and visual representation. This year, across a series of interconnected strands, we look particularly at the growing movement for climate justice and to strategies of collaboration and resistance – tracing narratives of colonialism, indigeneity, territoriality and migration.
Our focus on land-based struggles in Latin America takes its name from legendary Colombian filmmaker Marta Rodriguez’s 1981 documentary, Our Voice of Earth, Memory and Future, a film exposing the historic repression of indigenous Colombian farmers and their long fight against it. This newly, and beautifully restored film resonates profoundly with contemporary manifestations of neo-colonialism and climate barbarism on the continent – perhaps none more so than in the context of the on-going, historically-rooted, devastation visited on the Amazon rainforest.
Filmmakers in our Uninhabitable Earth strand travel from the mountains of Macedonia to the jungles of Sri Lanka in search of new futures beyond the spectre of such overwhelming crisis; and Franco-Brazilian filmmaker, Ana Vaz, joins us at the festival as our artist-in-focus, presenting around her debut feature film The Voyage Out – a reflection on ecological disaster and the possibility of renewal.
While Britain remains consumed by its political relationship with Europe, we also take a closer look at what life is like on the continent for those living on its fringes, with screenings of dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s The Rest; and Ian McDonald’s split-screen rendering of identity and belonging, Who is Europe?
At the margins often flourishes beauty and creativity, and with programme highlight Lisbon Beat we celebrate the city’s vibrant Afro-Portuguese music scene, with a screening and club night featuring sets from DJ Rita Maia and Príncipe Disco’s artist DJ Firmeza.
And the enduring power of community also illuminates Lucy Parker’s Solidarity, a collaboratively made exploration of blacklisting in the UK construction industry which serves as inspiration for a strand on collective resistance, and also our annual Critical Forum symposium – this year looking at collaborative filmmaking, curation and research as creative practice.
Finally, we’re beyond excited to open the festival with an exclusive Scottish performance of poet, filmmaker and 2017 Ted Hughes award winner Jay Bernard’s multimedia, multi-narrative work, Surge; before closing with the European premiere of Nguyen Trinh Thi’ s intimate and illusory portrait of Vietnam, Fifth Cinema.
The Document 2019 team.