A New Special Section – To Live Is To Forget

A new feature in the program of the 14th edition of Cinematik is the section To Live Is To Forget. The remarkable selection of movies presented in it is dealing with oblivion mainly from the perspective of collective memory – it examines the mechanism of manipulating history and tries to understand the inability of an individual to accept the truth.

One of the movies in this section is the documentary essay African Mirror (2019). Swiss filmmaker Misha Hedinger, who will also be one of the guests of Cinematik, reflects the work of his countryman René Gardi, a travel writer whose romanticized films about Africa have misshaped the view of several generations on this continent.

Colombian director Manuel Correa, the director of The Shape of Now (2019), will also be present at this years festival. His movie explores how Colombia is coping with the consequences of a half-century lasting civil war. How do eyewitnesses and contemporary Colombians perceive this bloody history? And what shall the history books read?

The other pictures of this section also share the courage to face the unpleasant truth. The film by Ruth Beckermann Waldheim’s Waltzer (2018) is dealing with the question how a man with a Nazi past could become both the UN Secretary-General and the President of Austria. Bisbee´17 (2018), by Robert Green is a reconstruction of a controversial deportation of a group of protesting miners from a small American town into the desert, revealing the weaknesses of collective memory, and also the immortality of sentiments and prejudices.

The Raft (2018) by Swedish director Marcus Lindeen returns after 45 years to one of the strangest group experiments in history. A three months lasting cruise on the Atlantic, which became famous in the media as “The Sex Raft”. Out of the seven films in the section To Live Is To Forget consisting mostly of documentaries, the last two are feature ones: the Canadian MS Slavic 7 (2019) and the Spanish movie King (2018).

This year’s DOX IN VITRO workshop is again prepared for documentary filmmakers. It offers beginning documentary filmmakers two days full of talks, consultations and exchange under the guidance of the most skilled lecturers. This year’s international team will consist of domestic programmer and manager Ondrej Starinský, German editor and screenwriter Tom Ernst, Serbian documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlić and Danish producer Ove Rishøj Jensen.