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FRAMING FILM FESTIVALS
Documentary
Film Festivals Vol. 1
Methods, History, Politics
Edited by
Aida Vallejo · Ezra Winton
Framing Film Festivals
Series Editors
Marijke de Valck
Department of Media and Culture Studies
Utrecht University
Utrecht, The Netherlands
Tamara L. Falicov
University of Kansas
Kansas City, MO, USA
Every day, somewhere in the world a film festival takes place. Most people
know about the festival in Cannes, the worlds’ leading film festival, and
many will also be familiar with other high profile events, like Venice, the
oldest festival; Sundance, America’s vibrant independent scene; and
Toronto, a premier market place. In the past decade the study of film fes-
tivals has blossomed. A growing number of scholars recognize the signifi-
cance of film festivals for understanding cinema’s production, distribution,
reception and aesthetics, and their work has amounted to a prolific new
field in the study of film culture. The Framing Film Festivals series pres-
ents the best of contemporary film festival research. Books in the series are
academically rigorous, socially relevant, contain critical discourse on festi-
vals, and are intellectually original. Framing Film Festivals offers a dedi-
cated space for academic knowledge dissemination.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14990
Aida Vallejo • Ezra Winton
Editors
Documentary Film
Festivals Vol. 1
Methods, History, Politics
Editors
Aida Vallejo Ezra Winton
University of the Basque Country ReImagining Value Action Lab
(UPV/EHU) Lakehead University
Leioa, Spain Thunder Bay, ON, Canada
Framing Film Festivals

ISBN 978-3-030-17319-7 ISBN 978-3-030-17320-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17320-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the
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publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Cro Magnon / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface: Vol. 1—By Aida Vallejo
and Ezra Winton
This book (indeed books, as there are two volumes that make up this col-
lection) has been elaborated through a long process of hard work and
mutual collaboration. As such, it has evolved significantly through the
progression of bringing new collaborators on board, expanding to a more
accurate, elaborate and thorough engagement with our much-loved topic
of research: documentary film festivals. To those who have met us at con-
ferences and festivals where we made flushed proclamations concerning
the prospective publication, we can at long last say it is in the world, and
do so with a satisfied smile on each of our faces and a feeling of release in
our souls.
The project’s wide scope has made it worthy of two volumes,
Documentary Film Festivals Vol. 1. Methods, History, Politics and
Documentary Film Festivals Vol. 2. Changes, Challenges, Professional
Perspectives, which form a tandem set that tackles key issues at stake in
both Documentary Studies and Film Festival Studies. Both books can be
read separately or together as a single collection, but they don’t require
readers to follow a given order. Nevertheless, the first volume includes
some contributions that help to frame the study of documentary film fes-
tivals in a wider context, namely a review of the literature that brings
together Film Festival Studies and Documentary Studies, an interview
with Bill Nichols about this subject of inquiry and a historical chapter
about documentary at film festivals. While we might say the first volume is
more oriented to the past, the second looks towards the future of docu-
mentary film festivals. Across both volumes, historical and political con-
cerns are complemented by the study of recent changes that have occurred
v
vi PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON
in the festival circuit that affect documentary production, distribution,

curation, exhibition and reception.
Now that we are completing our own stage of prolonged production,
we think it’s an appropriate moment to look back and share how we came
to research the fascinating topic that has culminated in two books, and to
introduce the reader to the personal experiences that brought us here. We
hope you enjoy the book before you and find its content as challenging as
we did, while also drawing inspiration from fresh insights into the enchant-
ing and dynamic social, political, economic and cultural worlds of docu-
mentary film festivals.
A Researcher Navigating a Growing Festival Circuit

(Aida Vallejo)
In 2004, while still a university student participating in the European
Erasmus Exchange programme, I visited the Thessaloniki Documentary
Festival in Greece. Back then I was stunned by the capacity of feature-
length documentaries to attract a big audience at a moment when the
classical formats associated with Nichols’s expository mode (1991, 34–38)
were challenged by new aesthetic forms. The appearance of Bowling for
Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002) in movie theatres two years earlier
represented a turning point in documentary exhibition and a boost for
documentarians to unleash their creativity and go beyond the classic dis-
tribution circuit, hitherto primarily controlled by television.
A few years later, in 2007, while studying the narrative construction of
contemporary documentary at Autonomous University of Madrid, I
focused my attention on film festivals as an object of academic study. The
shift from textual analysis to contextual concerns in my research seemed a
natural step towards understanding the channels of circulation that had
given exposure to the feature-length documentary form in previous years.
While working as a critic covering some documentary film festivals of dif-
ferent character, such as the veteran Zinebi Documentary and Short Film
Festival of Bilbao, the internationally recognized Thessaloniki Documentary
Festival and the daring newcomer Punto de Vista de Navarra, I started to
reflect upon their role in the circulation of films.
Creative documentary had suddenly taken the stage, breathing new life
into a genre that was for a long time relegated to television and which had
adopted the reportage formats associated with that medium. The spread
PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON vii
of creative documentary and the extension to feature-length productions

provided the necessary input for film festivals to multiply across the globe
and maintain a continuous flow of diverse and high-profile films that
would fill their programmes, while new digital technologies bolstered pro-
duction and exhibition, facilitating new recording, editing and projection
infrastructures. A preliminary search for documentary showcases inevita-
bly raised questions of context: How many festivals were currently operat-
ing worldwide? What was their international relevance? Who were the
people behind these events that created an audience for new documentary
trends spreading worldwide, such as first-person documentary or—as
would be seen later on—animation and interactive documentary? Eager to
answer these questions, I embarked on a research project that allowed me
to travel throughout the European continent, from Zinebi in my home-
town Bilbao (Basque Country, Spain) to Jihlava (Czech Republic); from
Dokufest in Prizren (Kosovo) to Helsinki (Finland); from ZagrebDox
(Croatia) to IDFA (Amsterdam, the Netherlands).
The proliferation of festivals specializing in documentary film cannot be
dissociated from the appearance of certain films that laid the foundations
for further documentary exhibition. Moreover, several festival founders
were also filmmakers themselves. I remember the words of the director of
the Documentarist Film Festival, Necati Sönmez, in the cafe of cinema
Olympion in Aristotle Square during the Thessaloniki Documentary Film
Festival (Greece) in 2010, as he spoke about his reasons and inspiration to
create his own film festival in Istanbul (Turkey). Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
(The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda, 2000) was indeed the film that pushed
him to start a festival in the metropolis divided by the Bosphorus in 2008,
a city in which he also worked as a filmmaker.
Interestingly, many of these films came from different parts of the
world, adding to the cultural and linguistic diversity for which film festivals
appeared to serve as a suitable breeding ground. Coming from a region
where linguistic policies were a major cultural and political concern, I was
curious about subtitling practices on the international circuit. I remember
the conversations about technical issues with subtitle projectionists in
Punto de Vista, as well as reflecting on the trilingual subtitling practices in
Zinebi (in English, Spanish and Basque) and wondering what happens
with Basque subtitles once the festival is over, given the limitations of
minoritized languages to be used for further exhibition.
Archival practices at these events also caught my attention. Quite unfor-
gettably, in my aim to watch films from the first editions of the Thessaloniki
viii PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON
Documentary Film Festival, I had to keep my balance on the back of a

motorbike with three boxes of VHS films covering a retrospective on
Yugoslavia programmed by the festival during the war in the 1990s. I had
found the films by digging in a warehouse in the industrial area on the
outskirts of the city thanks to the kind assistance of Thessaloniki Museum
of Cinema staff member Giorgos, who piloted the motorbike. The visit to
OSA Archivum in late winter in Budapest turned out to be quite different,
where I encountered the newest technology for film storage at an institu-
tion that benefits from the strong financial support of the Open Society
Foundation.1 Precisely at the moment I arrived (in 2009), they were sign-
ing the contract to include the films of Péter Forgács in their collection.
Throughout this period, conversations with festival directors, program-
mers, filmmakers, archivists and industry professionals provided me with
rich insights into the backstage of festival practices, but at the same time
these experiences brought about an ever-increasing number of new ques-
tions: What was the origin of these festivals? How had they developed
historically? What was their relation to politics? What were their program-
ming strategies? And what were their archival practices? How were film-
makers using them not only to exhibit films but also to get funding and
distribute them? What was their role in the preservation of linguistic diver-
sity? These two volumes provide answers to these questions, inviting the
reader to reflect upon the origins, aims and functioning patterns of the
documentary festival ecosystem.
A Curator Researching Film Festivals as Sites

of Culture and Politics (Ezra Winton)
Two decades ago I had an epiphany at a small film event, the World
Community Film Festival, in my hometown of Courtenay on Vancouver
Island (British Columbia, Canada), that would irrevocably change the
course of my life. I had read a review of a film that was playing at the fes-
tival, and with a friend headed to the Sid Williams Theatre to whet my
curiosity. At the time, I had little interest in documentary and knew noth-
ing about East Timor, nor media ownership concentration and the trou-
bling collusion between corporate power and media institutions, so it is
fair to say that Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
(Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, 1992) blew my mind. After the epic
documentary’s credits rolled, I recall leaping to my feet, grabbing my
PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON ix
friend by the arm and yelling: “LET’S GO!” As I ran up the aisle past the
mostly middle-aged and elderly audience members, I felt the unique and
rare force of a life-changing, world-view-defining moment take over my
entire being. I burst out into the sleepy streets of my town, and rubbing
my eyes as they adjusted to the late afternoon light, shrieked to my friend
with a kind of a strange zeal that doubly infected and gave him cause for
apprehension: “WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING—NOW!” And off we
went, naively starting an East Timor Alert Network chapter in Courtenay
and telling everyone and anyone we could about the insidious ways main-
stream media was manufacturing our very own consent—without us even
knowing it!
It is important to note that this film was a documentary and that the
space where I encountered the said documentary was formed by a film
festival. Documentary, as fiction film’s naughty and regularly punished
cousin, rarely finds space on commercial cinema screens anywhere, let
alone in Canada’s Hollywood-owned and dominated market.2
Manufacturing Consent certainly wasn’t enjoying a celebrated run at
Courtenay’s local Megaplex alongside Reservoir Dogs, Basic Instinct and
The Crying Game. No, this profound paradigm-shifting moment in my life
occurred because two traditionally marginalized and alternative media
forms and platforms converged in my town to exhibit a film that chal-
lenged the status quo to which I had blithely and ignorantly acquiesced to
until that point. For me, that moment represents the transformative and
explosive potential of the union of socially engaged documentary cinema
and the public-facing film festival. Realizing this meant I would end up
studying, researching and creating projects that interrogate and celebrate
this combustible combination of cultural/political expression with
social space.
With that in mind, in 2003 I co-founded (with Svetla Turnin) what is
now the documentary world’s largest community and campus-based exhi-
bition network, Cinema Politica, a vast circuit in its own right, which runs
parallel to the ever-expanding film festival circuit. As an alternative exhibi-
tion network focused on showcasing political and independent point-of-
view (POV) documentaries, Cinema Politica often collaborates and
interfaces with many documentary festivals. As such, I have had the privi-
lege to attend and work with festivals like Rencontres Internationales du
Documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) and Festival du nouveau cinéma
(FNC) in Montreal, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary
x PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON
Festival (Hot Docs) and imagineNATIVE in Toronto, Docudays UA

International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Kiev, Jeden
Svet/One World Human Rights Film Festival in Prague, International
Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in Amsterdam, Sofia
International Film Festival in Sofia and many others. Along the way I have
published critical pieces about the lack of space provided to activists at
large documentary festivals (such as Hot Docs), I’ve sat on juries and I’ve
written countless film reviews thanks to the access to often hard-to-reach
films these festivals afforded me. In more recent years I have also taught
courses on film festivals and curatorial politics, sometimes with a docu-
mentary focus.
But it is programming that has sustained my interest in documentary
film festivals over the years. The cultural politics of programming—that is
critical consideration regarding who decides what gets in, what stays out
and the manner in which each film is presented to the public—is one of
the most fascinating and under-studied aspects of film festivals as a wider
subject, and documentary festivals in particular. We live in an age of hyper-
curation, where we constantly accede our own agency in choosing what
content flows in the many channels that comprise our mediascapes.
Festivals have risen to prominence as traditional (broadcast) television still
clings to Palaeolithic conventions and modalities (including running times
defined by advertising, suit-and-tie hosts, the erasure of the working
classes and the antiquated laugh track). Yet festivals have also flourished at
a time of the rampant proliferation of the so-called new media, where
eyeballs all over the world increasingly refocus as they shift from larger to
smaller screens.
So, on the one hand, documentary film festivals offer an exciting alter-
native space and experience to story-broke Hollywood and its Megaplexes,
as well as traditional television’s craggy conventions. On the other hand,
documentary film festivals are thriving in an era of online media consump-
tion that only continues to grow; on this latter point it is perhaps encour-
aging to see that all over the world audiences still seek out the kind of
experience that festivals offer, that is the “event-fullness” of experiencing
a (documentary) film with a bunch of strangers in the dark, who later may
or may not mingle and discuss the stories they have encountered together,
in a social setting.
Either way, documentary and film festivals are here to stay—as sepa-
rately defined cultural and media phenomena, and as intermingling forces
that are reflecting and giving shape to our cinemas and cultures on a global
PREFACE: VOL. 1—BY AIDA VALLEJO AND EZRA WINTON xi
scale. For my part, I’m delighted to be along for the ride and hope to be
running up aisles and screaming outside of festival screenings well into
the future.
Leioa, Spain Aida Vallejo

Thunder Bay, ON, Canada Ezra Winton
Notes
1. An initiative of the investor George Soros, who also founded the Central
European University to which the archive is associated.
2. It is estimated, according to Acland (2003), that commercial exhibition
screens in Canada show less than 3% of Canadian cinema outside the prov-
ince of Quebec (where numbers are notably higher).
References
Acland, Charles. 2003. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Acknowledgements: Vol. 1
This project, which has culminated in a two-volume collection of chapters

and interviews, is the result of several years of research, some of it funded
by different public institutions and conducted through various research
projects. We would like to thank the University of the Basque Country
(UPV/EHU), IkerFESTS research project,1 HAUtaldea research proj-
ect,2 MAC research group, the Department of Education, Universities and
Research of the Government of the Basque Country, the ReImagining
Value Action Lab (RiVAL) at Lakehead University in Canada, the Social
Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada) and the Spanish
Ministry of Education and Science and the Spanish Ministry of Economy
and Competitiveness (National Plan Research Actions I+D+I), funder of
@CIN-EMA research project.3 Special thanks to the people whose taxes
help to develop independent research, the output of which will hopefully
contribute to better understand and improve the social and cultural envi-
ronments to which they belong.
We would like to thank everyone involved in this project, including
those who had to drop out during this long way. Enormous thanks to each
of the contributing authors of both volumes, who gave their time, hard
work and expertise so that this project would come to fruition. We would
also like to express deep gratitude to the team at Palgrave Macmillan, and
especially the Framing Film Festivals series editors, Marijke de Valck and
Tamara Falicov, for their support, encouragement and wise advice
throughout the review and publication process.
We would also like to thank our colleagues who helped us in both obvi-
ous and subtle ways to get through this long project, particularly Marijke
xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: VOL. 1
de Valck, Skadi Loist, María Paz Peirano, Thomas Waugh, Lucas Freeman
and Liz Czach, all of whom shared their experience and knowledge and
helped us with their generous advice. A number of festival organizers,
filmmakers, archivists, television and other institutional representatives
(and other scholars and practitioners) also helped us track, record and
analyse the current state of documentary film festivals worldwide. Over
the years of conducting this research and bringing these two volumes to
light, we frequented several festivals, all of which are mentioned in our
Preface and/or introductions. But needless to say, we are grateful for the
opportunities they have afforded the intrepid and weary researcher balanc-
ing cinephilia with critical inquiry.
Finally, thanks to our families, friends and partners for their support,
patience and help. The time we have stolen from them to bring this proj-
ect to light is not insignificant. In this long process we have seen new
people coming into our life while others left in the process. It is to them
that we owe our deepest gratitude.
Notes
1. Research project on Film and Audiovisual Festivals in the Basque Country,
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Grant number:
EHUA16/31 http://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/ikerfests/.
2. “Visual Anthropology: a model for creativity and knowledge transference.”
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Grant number:
EHU11/26. http://www.ehu.eus/ehusfera/hautaldea/.
3. “Transnational relations in Hispanic digital cinemas: the axes of Spain,
Mexico, and Argentina.” Grant number: CSO2014-52750-P. The project is
led by Miguel Fernández Labayen and Josetxo Cerdán Los Arcos at
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). https://uc3m.libguides.
com/c.php?g=499893&p=3422753.
Contents
Introduction—Volume 1: Documentary Film Festivals:

Methods, History, Politics 1
Aida Vallejo and Ezra Winton
Defining Documentary in the Festival Circuit: A Conversation

with Bill Nichols 19
Aida Vallejo
Part I Research and Methods 29
Introduction to Part I, Vol. 1: Researching Documentary Film

Festivals 31
Aida Vallejo
Film Festival Research Workshops: Debates on Methodology 41

Skadi Loist
The Data-Driven Festival: Recordkeeping and Archival

Practices 53
Heather L. Barnes
xv
xvi Contents
Part II Histories and Origins 61
Introduction to Part II, Vol. 1: Mapping the History of

Documentary Film Festivals 63
Aida Vallejo
The Rise of Documentary Festivals: A Historical Approach 77

Aida Vallejo
The Film Festival as a Vehicle for Memory Officialization:

The Afterlife of WWII in the Yugoslav Documentary and
Short Film Festival, 1954–2004101
Dunja Jelenković
Forging a Cultural Elite: Nyon and the Age of Festival

Programmers123
Christian Jungen
Finding a Position on the Global Map of Film Festivals:

The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival143
Eija Niskanen
Part III Politics and Policies 165
Introduction to Part III, Vol. 1: Politics and Policies167

Ezra Winton
The Film Festival of Independent and Underground:

The Case of DOChina175
Tit Leung Cheung
Mainstreaming Documentary and Activism at Toronto’s Hot

Docs Festival193
Ezra Winton
Contents xvii
The Development of Documentary Film Festivals in India:

A Small-Media Phenomenon221
Giulia Battaglia
Found in Translation: Film Festivals, Documentary and the

Preservation of Linguistic Diversity241
Antía López-Gómez, Aida Vallejo, Mª Soliña Barreiro,
and Amanda Alencar
Index of Festivals265
Index of Subjects273
Index of Films287
Index of Names293
Notes on Contributors
Amanda Alencar is an assistant professor in the Department of Media &

Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, where
she specializes in media and migration and intercultural communication.
Alencar received her PhD in Audiovisual Communication and Journalism
from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 2012. After
completion of her degree, she was awarded a Marie Curie Post-doctoral
Fellowship from the European Commission to conduct her research proj-
ect titled “TV News for Promoting Interculturalism: A Novel Step
Towards Immigrant Integration” at the Department of Media Studies at
the University of Amsterdam. Alencar is also a board member of the
Professional Advisory Committee (PAC) at Erasmus University Rotterdam,
and a former member of the Galician Association of Communication
(AGACOM). She is guest editing two special issues in the (open-access)
peer-reviewed journals International Communication Gazette and Media
& Communication.
Heather L. Barnes is the Digital Curation Librarian at Wake Forest
University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library and a PhD candidate at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and
Library Science. Her research interests include moving image archives,
documentary film, participatory and collaborative archives and digital
curation. She lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Ma Soliña Barreiro holds a PhD in Social Communication. She has been
a visiting researcher at ARIAS (Atelier de recherche sur l’intermédialité et
les Arts du spectacle, CNRS, ENS, Sorbonne III). She is a researcher spe-
xix
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
cialized in avant-garde, documentary, silent film and cinema in minority

languages. Her findings have led to several publications, including “Public
Policies, Diversity and National Cinemas in the Spanish Context: Catalonia,
Basque Country and Galicia.” Communication & Society 30 (1) 2017. She
has presented in academic conferences, such as IAMCR and ECREA. She
works as a full professor at ESUP-UPF (Pompeu Fabra University,
Barcelona) and is a member of the Estudos Audiovisuais (EA) (Audio-
visual Studies) research group at the University of Santiago de Compostela,
Spain.
Giulia Battaglia is a visual anthropologist interested in both anthropol-
ogy and media theories. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology
in 2012 at SOAS, University of London, with a thesis on the politics of
categorisation of documentary film practices in India and in particular on
their historical (re)articulation. She is a teaching fellow in the
Department of Anthropology at University of London (SOAS).
Battaglia has worked as a film festival curator (“From the Inside
Looking Out … Filmic Visions of South Asia’s Tacit ‘Other’,” Lisbon
2012; “Persistence/Resistance in London,” 2011), a documentary
film juror (“Watersprite: Cambridge International Student Festival,”
2011) and Assistant Director for Video Installation (“BAR1 Project,”
Bangalore 2008) and independent film projects.
Tit Leung Cheung received his PhD in researching the East Asian docu-
mentary film festivals. He is working as a producer for a number of Hong
Kong documentaries, for instance, Yellowing (2016), We the Workers
(2017) and Ballad on the Shore (2017). His curatorial efforts include
Hong Kong Independent Film Festival and Autonomous Cinema. The
Hong Kong Actual Images Association is his latest initiative: a retro-
spective programme on 1980–1997 Hong Kong documentary was
the first project of the association.
Dunja Jelenković is a researcher at the Centre for Cultural History of
Contemporary Societies at the Paris Saclay University (University of
Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines). Her doctoral thesis, “Cultural and
Political History of Yugoslav Documentary and Short Film Festival,
1954–2004—From Yugoslav Socialism to Serbian Nationalism,” dealt
with festival programming practices and cultural memory in former
Yugoslavia (Paris Saclay, 2017). The project was funded by the
Foundation for Cultural Heritage Sciences PATRIMA (Paris, France).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi
Formerly a programmer for the festival that was the subject of her thesis
(2008–2011), Jelenković is presently active as an independent curator.
Her current research focuses on the images of conflicts in the Yugoslavian
space.
Christian Jungen is the artistic director of the Zurich Film Festival. He
has worked as a film critic for more than 25 years, covered festivals such as
Cannes, Sundance, Venice, Berlin and Nyon and has served as head of the
culture section of Swiss Sunday newspaper NZZ am Sonntag. He is the
author of the award-winning book Hollywood in Canne$: The History of a
Love-Hate Relationship (2014) and of the biography Moritz de Hadeln:
Mister Filmfestival (2018, Rüffer & Rub). He has won the Prix Pathé for
excellence in film criticism and is a founding member of the Swiss Film
Academy. He lives in Zurich, Switzerland.
Skadi Loist is Visiting Professor of Production Cultures in Audiovisual
Media Industries at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in
Potsdam, Germany, and a project leader of “Circulation of Film in
the International Film Festival Network and the Impact of Film
Festivals on Global Film Culture” (BMBF grant funded, 2017–
2020). Loist is the co-founder of the Film Festival Research Network
(FFRN) and a Steering Committee member of the European Network
for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). Her research interests include
developments in film and media industries, cultural studies and gen-
der/queer studies with a focus on film festivals and queer cinema.
Antía López-Gómez is a tenured professor at the University of Santiago
de Compostela, Spain, where she teaches European audio-visual policies.
She received a PhD in Information Sciences from the Complutense
University of Madrid with a study of advertising. López-Gómez is a mem-
ber of the Estudos Audiovisuais (EA) (Audio-visual Studies) research
group at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, specializing in
the subject “Cinema and Identity.” She has written numerous articles on
communication policies in Europe, primarily focused on the audio-visual
sector.
Eija Niskanen teaches and studies film and animation at the University
of Helsinki’s Film and Television Studies and Japanese Studies. She holds
an MA from UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her research
interests include Japanese cinema and animation, as well as film festi-
vals with an Asian context. She is conducting a study on Japanese
xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
animations based on the Finnish original Moomin concept, con-

ducted partly at Meiji University in Tokyo. Niskanen is the program-
ming director for Helsinki Cine Aasia film festival, one of the
founding members of Helsinki International Film Festival and she
coordinates yearly Finland Film Festival in Japan event.
Aida Vallejo is a film historian and social anthropologist who works as an
associate professor at the University of the Basque Country, Spain, where
she teaches documentary film theory and practice. She holds a PhD in
History of Cinema from Autonomous University of Madrid with a study
of documentary film festivals in Europe and an MA in Theory and Practice
of Documentary Film from Autonomous University of Barcelona. Vallejo
is the founder and coordinator of the Documentary Work-Group of the
European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). She has writ-
ten extensively on documentary and narratology, film festivals and ethnog-
raphy of the media, and with María Paz Peirano has co-edited Film
Festivals and Anthropology (2017). She has carried out fieldwork at several
international festivals, mainly across Europe.
Ezra Winton is a curator, critic and teacher. He is a visiting scholar at
Lakehead University, Canada, where he researches film festivals, curatorial
practices and politics, screen ethics, Canadian cinema and Indigenous film
and media. He is finishing a book that looks at the commercialization of
documentary at film festivals, with Hot Docs as the case study, called
Buying in to Doing Good: Documentary Politics and Curatorial Ethics at
the Hot Docs Film Festival, and is co-editing a collection with Lakota artist
Dana Claxton titled Insiders/Outsiders: The Cultural Politics and Ethics of
Indigenous Representation and Participation in Canada’s Media Arts. He
is a co-editor of Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the
National Film Board of Canada (2010) and Screening Truth to Power: A
Reader on Documentary Activism (2014), and is a contributing editor at
POV Magazine. He is also a co-founder and Director of Programming of
Cinema Politica, the world’s largest documentary-screening network.
Winton is a settler scholar of Dutch and English ancestry who was born
and raised on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. https://twit-
ter.com/ezrawinton.
List of Images
The Rise of Documentary Festivals: A Historical Approach

Image 1 Audience of the Festival dei Popoli in Florence in the 1970s 83
Image 2 Audience waiting outside the Pathé Tuschinski theatre in
Amsterdam before the opening ceremony of the 2015 edition 86
The Film Festival as a Vehicle for Memory Officialization:

The Afterlife of WWII in the Yugoslav Documentary
and Short Film Festival, 1954–2004
Image 1 Cover of the festival catalogues: 1965, 1966, and 1967 106
Image 2 The Pit—Grote Morta (Jama, Milorad Bajić, Soko Film,
1991), screenshot 114
Forging a Cultural Elite: Nyon and the Age of Festival

Programmers
Image 1 Erika de Hadeln with Freddy Buache (left) and polish
director Jerzy Bossak at the 1988 Nyon festival 128
Image 2 Director Ara Vahouni (left), Hans-Joachim Schlegel and
Erika de Hadeln introducing Armenian films in Nyon 1989 132
Image 3 Erika de Hadeln with Christian Zeender, head of Cinema
in the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, 1988 135
xxiii
xxiv List of Images
Finding a Position on the Global Map of Film Festivals:

The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival
Image 1 Roundtable at the Asia Symposium in 1989 152
Image 2 International and Japanese guests at the 1993 edition of
Yamagata IDFF, including Tian Zhuangzhuang, Abbas
Kiarostami (first row) and Alan Berliner (second row) 156
The Film Festival of Independent and Underground:

The Case of DOChina
Image 1 Main street of the Songzhuang area 179
Image 2 An event cancelled due to police intervention 183
Image 3 Poster of the 7th edition of DOChina 187
Mainstreaming Documentary and Activism at Toronto’s

Hot Docs Festival
Image 1 Still from Amy Miller’s The Carbon Rush (2012) 204
Image 2 Police in India patrol a protest in this production still
from Jai Bhim Comrade (Anand Patwardhan, 2012) 207
The Development of Documentary Film Festivals in India:

A Small-Media Phenomenon
Image 1 Vikalp. Mumbai, Festival 2004 230
Image 2 Vikalp. Films for Freedom—slogans 231
Found in Translation: Film Festivals, Documentary

and the Preservation of Linguistic Diversity
Image 1 Screening of the film Colours of the Alphabet (2016, Alastair
Cole) subtitled into Sardinian at the 2017 Babel Film Festival.
The film puts into question if children in Zambia should be
taught in English, and the features Soli, Nayanja, Bemba and
English languages. (Image by Alastair Cole) 253
Image 2 Zinegin Film Festival’s audience follows the organizers
in a “Bideo poteo”. The event mixes the Basque tradition
of “poteo” (which consists on going from bar to bar to
have drinks together) with the screening of a short film
in each bar. (Image by Aida Vallejo) 255
List of Tables
Introduction to Part II, Vol. 1: Mapping the History of

Documentary Film Festivals
Table 1 Documentary film festivals (1940s–1960s) 65
Table 3 Documentary film festivals (1990s) 67
xxv
Introduction—Volume 1: Documentary Film
Festivals: Methods, History, Politics
Aida Vallejo and Ezra Winton
Documentary cinema has experienced growing cultural visibility, commer-

cial distribution and academic recognition in the last two decades. While
technological changes and digitization certainly have had a role in bolster-
ing the genre, the steadily increasing number of exhibition sites has been
paramount to non-fiction film’s ascent. From Beijing to Toronto,
Amsterdam to Kerala, Maputo to Doha and beyond, documentary film
festivals have proliferated as a composite component of the massive spread
of film festivals in general (estimated to have grown to somewhere between
4000 and 5000 in just six decades). Today these documentary art, culture
and business platforms make up a vast circulation and exhibition circuit
that wields ever-increasing power over documentary cultures at the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century.
Even if documentary festivals have served as a fundamental source for
researchers to discover and explore the films that today form (and chal-
A. Vallejo (*)
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Leioa, Spain
e-mail: aida.vallejo@ehu.eus
E. Winton
Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. Vallejo, E. Winton (eds.), Documentary Film Festivals Vol. 1,
Framing Film Festivals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17320-3_1
2 A. VALLEJO AND E. WINTON
lenge) the canon, focused academic studies on documentary festivals are

scarce. Moreover, appraisal of their historical evolution, political role,
economic influence, cultural value and social significance is a necessary
step towards a broad understanding of this alternative circulation and
exhibition circuit. The chapters and interviews in our two volumes address
these lacunae, while approaching the various aspects of documentary fes-
tivals through different lenses and from disparate disciplines, thus inter-
rogating a wide range of topics that will interest readers focused on both
documentary and festivals. Furthermore, the authors in this collection not
only analyze the international network of documentary festivals, identify-
ing relevant events from both historical and contemporary perspectives,
but together they expand research carried out within the relatively young
field of Film Festival Studies, while linking with academics working in
other fields and disciplines such as documentary, anthropology, history,
cultural and media studies, arts management, minoritized languages and,
from a wider perspective, film literacy and the creative industries.
While Bill Nichols notes at the beginning of this volume that the influ-
ence of documentary film festivals over the documentary form should not
be overestimated, we cannot ignore Marijke de Valck’s sapient take on the
enduring importance of (researching) film festivals as obligatory points of
passage “because they are events—actors—that have become so important
to the production, distribution and consumption of many films that, with-
out them, an entire network of practices, places, people, etc. would fall
apart” (2007, 36). With de Valck’s observation in mind, this collection
explores the nature, dynamics and impact of documentary film festivals
worldwide, offering a focused, collective effort to understand the context
in which contemporary documentary practices and exhibition modes
develop. We believe this publication is a first step into a fascinating world
of globalized and globalizing events that have become privileged (and
often contested) spaces for the celebration, negotiation, discussion and,
above all, curation, exhibition and reception of documentary cinema.
In what follows, we start by offering a review of the points of conver-
gence of Film Festival Studies and Documentary Studies. Then, we pro-
pose a definition of the documentary festival. Drawing on concepts
developed by Nichols, we deepen epistemological, socio-political and aes-
thetic concerns to analyze the specificities of documentary festivals. Finally,
we summarize the contents of the three parts of this volume, which focus
on research, history and politics, respectively.
INTRODUCTION—VOLUME 1: DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVALS: METHODS… 3
Bringing Together Film Festival and Documentary

Studies
This book—which is the first in a two-volume set—brings together two
fields evolving within Film Studies: documentary and film festivals. While
the latter is a more recent development with an exponential increase in
literature appearing since 2007, following the publication of the ground-
breaking book Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global
Cinephilia (de Valck 2007), documentary has deeper scholarly roots,
punctuated and bolstered by academics like Thomas Waugh (1984) in the
1980s, Bill Nichols (1991), Michael Renov (1993) and Brian Winston
(1995) in the 1990s and writers at Jump Cut since its launch in 1974.1
The genre’s more established tradition, which has attracted increasing aca-
demic attention since the 1990s, was elevated by Nichols’s seminal
Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1991) and the
launch of the University of Minnesota Press’s Visible Evidence series in
1997.2 Recent trends in documentary scholarship in the English language
show an ever-growing number of publications that expand the documen-
tary canon towards new geographical areas, identity and ethics issues and
aesthetic trends. We see this as a decentralizing tendency that contributes
to a diversity of approaches as well as scholars’ profiles.
On the other hand, Film Festival Studies is in a moment of wider con-
centration of core-academics and research works, partly due to its much
younger trajectory. The study of film festivals has grown parallel to the
proliferation of festival events worldwide, attracting the interest of aca-
demics such as de Valck, who laid the foundation for this research area in
her comprehensive study that positioned the festival circuit as a globally
connected phenomenon (2007). de Valck (together with Skadi Loist) fur-
ther developed the field with the creation of the Film Festival Research
Network and (with Tamara Falicov in 2015) Palgrave Macmillan’s
Framing Film Festivals Series, of which these two volumes are a part.
Equally so, the work of Dina Iordanova, as general editor of the Film
Festival Yearbook Series (2009–2014) and the Films Need Festivals, Festivals
Need Films Series (since 2013), at St Andrews Film Studies publishing
house, has been instrumental in advancing the field.
The study of film festivals can be framed by a general trend towards
interdisciplinary approaches to film history, but also by a growing interest
in transnational and world cinema, after the fall of the big national studios
that had initially produced and defined “national cinemas.” Film festivals
have therefore attracted the interests of researchers who study the global
dynamics of film circulation, theoreticians who seek to redress the colonial

excesses of classic film history and scholars interested in minority film prac-
tices that operate alongside commercial distribution channels.
Documentary certainly comprises film practices that work at the margins
of commercial cinema, that are characterized by affordable means of pro-
duction for peripheral cinemas and, at the same time, that contest estab-
lished power dynamics.
Within Film Festival Studies, the literature devoted to documentary
festivals is quite scarce. Sporadic contributions have appeared in aca-
demic journals and books in the past few years, but these are dispersed
from divergent disciplines and lack common referents (see de Valck and
Soeteman 2010; Nornes 2009). Documentary festivals have been the
subject of recent research, including doctoral theses developed by con-
tributors of these two volumes. In addition, a smattering of book-length
studies approach festivals of social concern, including documentary
festivals. The Film Festival Yearbook 4: Film Festivals and Activism
(Iordanova and Torchin 2012) tackles activist documentary festivals but
focuses mainly on human rights film festivals and the social concerns
associated with their programmes. In this line, new publications by social
scientists have looked at small Canadian documentary festivals (Roy
2014), the human rights film festival circuit (Tascón 2015) and activist
film festivals (Tascón and Wils 2016). Much of the literature devoted to
documentary festivals includes anniversary books published by the festi-
vals themselves,3 which of course focus on one single festival and, in
most cases, are published in the original language of the country where
the festival takes place.
Another primary source of documentary festival discourse is film criti-
cism, especially festival reports, which cover these events and appear in
specialized publications, such as POV Magazine (published by the
Documentary Organization of Canada), Dox Magazine (published by
the European Documentary Network, 1993–2014) and Documentary
Magazine (published by the International Documentary Association).
Following the increased international visibility of documentary, general-
ist film journals have joined this trend, including classics such as Positif
and Cahiers du cinéma in the French realm or Sight & Sound in the
Anglophone context, as well as increased coverage from industry maga-
zines like Variety. In addition, an ever-increasing number of blogs and
online publications have added to the clamour. On the industry side,
festival reports are conditioned by the urgency germane to journalism, as
well as the dependent relationships that journalists and critics establish

with film festivals (which control the access to different films, profession-
als and information through the accreditation system, and in many
instances provide critics with free travel and accommodation). On the
other hand, some academic journals have regularly published festival
reports (Visual Anthropology Review offers interesting examples for eth-
nographic film), while providing deeper analyses that look at the histori-
cal contexts and social concerns, thus widening the scope of the
instantaneous film analyses that prevail in most reports. In this regard,
Necsus journal has opened up a new space for academic writing about
film festivals, with a special section—edited by de Valck and Loist—
including reports that aim to provide critical reflection on these events
from a scholarly view.
The influence of non-academic writings for the conformation of docu-
mentary canons should not be underestimated. The special issue devoted
to documentary that Sight & Sound published in September 2014 offers a
“Documentary Poll” with a list of “the greatest documentaries of all
time”, according to the opinions of critics, curators, academics and film-
makers. Человек с киноаппаратом (The Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga
Vertov, 1929) tops the list, while Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), Sans
Soleil (Sunless, Chris Marker, 1983), Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog,
Alain Resnais, 1955) and The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) follow.
While watching the interactive website provided by Sight & Sound, which
graphically displays the hierarchy of films, one wonders to what extent
festivals have been crucial to the international exposure of these films and,
further still, for their survival, which in turn has ensured they are recog-
nized in the annals of film history. Apart from the obvious qualities of
cinematographic excellence and historical significance, the controversy
around, for instance, the exhibition of Night and Fog at Cannes in 1956
certainly increased the debate around the film in journalistic and aca-
demic circles.4
Differences aside, the performance of Moore’s films at Cannes and
his attainment of the world’s most influential film festival award is surely
one of the reasons why Bowling for Columbine ranks higher than
Frederick Wiseman’s High School (1968) in Sight & Sound’s
Documentary Poll, or Nicolas Philibert’s Être et Avoir (To Be and to
Have, 2002)—to compare it with a more contemporary work. Other
works from peripheral cinemas, such as La Batalla de Chile (The Battle
of Chile, Patricio Guzmán, 1975), wouldn’t have even reached the crit-
ics and filmmakers who voted for the list, if they hadn’t been shown
at European film festivals.
The study of film festivals has provided critical insights into the inner
dynamics of programming, management, political intervention and film
circulation. From the social space shared by their attendees (Bazin 1955)
and the various roles they assume (Dayan 2000), or their impact in film
historiography (Di Chiara and Re 2011); to commercial aspects, such as
festivals’ effects in the local and global space economy (Stringer 2001),
their repercussion in the value-adding process for films and filmmakers (de
Valck and Soeteman 2010; de Valck 2014; Bosma 2015) or the influence
of festival film funds in shaping world cinema (Ross 2011), the study of
film festivals offers comprehensive analyses that look at these global phe-
nomena as sites where multiple agendas (economic, political, social, cul-
tural, etc.) coexist (Harbord 2002; Turan 2002; de Valck 2007; Wong
2011). The essays in this collection approach these fascinating facets from
a wide range of geographical locations, looking at key aspects that shape
festivals’ histories, political aims and stakeholder (including commer-
cial) effects.
In the field of documentary studies, film festivals have rarely been
addressed. We find some exceptions in recent works, such as David
Hogarth’s reflection on the global dimension of these events (2006,
33–36), Ruby Rich’s recount of their importance in the introduction to
Cinema Journal’s (2010) special issue on documentary, Ana Vicente’s
approach to documentary distribution (2008), Vallejo’s works about the
use of the festival circuit as a production and promotion platform for doc-
umentary (2014, 2015), or Winton’s forthcoming monograph on Hot
Docs. In fact, textual analysis and historical revisionism of documentary
classics prevail in more recent publications (Austin and De Jong 2008;
Winston 2013), while new interactive and collaborative practices have
also been addressed, extending the documentary analysis to contexts of
production and distribution in the digital age (Aston et al. 2017). Internet
platforms have indeed centred many of the debates, while festivals still
remain a mostly unexplored area.
Blind spots do persist: If we look at Ian Aitken’s Encyclopedia of
Documentary Film (2005), only Cinéma du Réel in Paris and IDFA in
Amsterdam have individual entries. Nevertheless, many festivals are men-
tioned throughout the text, and major events such as Cannes, Berlin or
Sundance appear several times, usually in reference to the awards received
by key filmmakers. Other collections devoted to the analysis of documen-
tary films refer to festivals sporadically, and New York, Sundance and
Cannes appear as the most frequently mentioned in this regard.
We have stewarded these two Documentary Film Festivals volumes in an
effort to explore the documentary festival ecosystem as a relatively recent
phenomenon that—as the biological metaphor suggests—creates a space
for the development and nurturance of film cultures within it, while also
creating a mutual dependence. The analysis of historical changes occur-
ring in the exhibition circuit, and political actions fostered within it, are all
key to this study. These central cultural fields serve as thematic axes that
inspire the contributions herein, guiding us in our aim to contribute to a
better understanding of documentary film in its past, present and
future contexts.
Towards a Definition of the Documentary Film

Festival (Part I)
In order to better grasp the intersection of the documentary film and the
film festival, we believe it is worthwhile to attempt a definition of sorts. In
an era in which the boundaries of the documentary genre continue to
blur, and where hybrid forms that mix non-fiction, fiction, animation and
experimental practices are on the rise, it is important to consider the role
that festivals play in defining what a documentary is, which of course leads
to considerations of the ways in which the documentary film festival may
also be defined.
To guide us in these efforts, we draw on various concepts discussed by
Nichols (1991, 2010), which point to key aspects that help guide the
focus of each of our two volumes. The first aspect, elaborated next, is
related to epistemological, socio-political and aesthetic concerns widely
developed in documentary theory. Their exploration traverses the meth-
odological, historical and political considerations discussed in this first vol-
ume. The second, elaborated in our second volume, focuses on the
institutional framework referred by Nichols (1991, 14–31), which identi-
fies authoritative agents that contribute to defining documentary, includ-
ing practitioners, institutions, texts and viewers—all of which interact
within the festival setting. This second definitional aspect is widely related
to recent changes which have occurred in the festival circuit and its grow-
ing influence in production and distribution, a core line of inquiry of our
second volume’s chapters.
Bringing these two aspects together, we define documentary festivals as

public and/or industry events dedicated to the curation and exhibition of
the cinematic genre or mode known as documentary, differentiating them-
selves from events specializing in other film genres and practices, such as
fiction or animation. Documentary film festivals are social, cultural and
discursive spaces in which multiple sectors, agents and forces of documen-
tary film, industry and culture interact (be they directors, producers, sales
agents, funders, sponsors, programmers, critics, audiences etc.) and where
creative and economic (and sometimes political) alliances are forged.
Specializing in this genre calls for a distinctive frame of interpretation as it
selects films that claim a relation to “reality” both in form (with its own
conventions, aesthetics and sub-genres) and in content (portraying alleged
“facts” and representing lived experience). This involves an intrinsic socio-
political dimension and a particular relationship with (and against) main-
stream media discourses. In what follows, we deepen the epistemological,
socio-political and aesthetic aspects that define the documentary festival,
looking at specific festival dynamics that have occurred in recent years.
When looking at the specificities of the documentary genre, Nichols
points to the key issues at stake, including (but not limited to) (i) the
genre’s relation to truth and knowledge; (ii) documentary’s socio-political
commitment; and (iii) its distinctive aesthetic and narrative modes of rep-
resentation (1991, 2010). It follows that these three definitional aspects of
documentary are also crucially deployed towards a working definition of
“the documentary film festival” as a cultural, social, political, economic
and aesthetic space that inspires other particular frameworks of
interpretation.
In our definitional pursuit, we position documentary film festivals firstly
in relation to audience expectations and the culturally contingent notion
of veracity, or “the real.” As a concept, as a manifestation of conventions
or as a political/aesthetic postulation, documentary drags with it wherever
it goes the heavy weight of truth claims. Logically then, these same quali-
ties—for better or worse—become embodied and refracted in the spaces
and structures that are designed to care for (curate), nurture (support)
and share (present) documentary. One might say that documentary’s rela-
tionship to the real world extends into the screening contexts in which the
film texts circulate, meaning documentary film festivals equally stake out
claims on truth in and at their attendant events. Moreover, documentary
not only trades on truth (perhaps best captured by the phrase “visible
evidence”), but there is an indelible association with veracity that the
genre injects into the experience of each festival that showcases documen-
tary. Following Nichols’s provocation, where documentary for the most
part engages with the world in which we live, and fiction describes and
presents a world imagined by the filmmaker (Nichols 2010, xi), it follows
documentary festivals are engaged in presenting the world on screen.
Regardless of hybridity flourishes or the familiar territorial disputes, “doc-
umentary” remains a category and concept that sketches a (rough) outline
that demarcates the audio-visual recording and representation of actuality.
The documentary festival setting therefore privileges a particular form of
reception in which the viewer is led to expect this representation of reality
and thus reads (and decodes) the films associatively.
Secondly, the socio-political dimension, although not unique to docu-
mentary festivals, is a key aspect of the documentary film festival. As illus-
trated in the section on politics in this volume, documentary’s association
with acts of resisting dominant narratives, upending the status quo and
intermingling with political provocations and social movements is at the
heart of many documentary festivals’ (often activist/advocacy) origins.
Nevertheless, social justice and political activism tend to find hostile com-
pany in business cultures and spaces, and so it is perhaps no surprise that
at mainstream commercial festivals like Cannes, Tribeca and the Toronto
International Film Festival (TIFF) one might search in vain for festival-
related or sanctioned activism, while instead encountering a strong mer-
cantile spirit. As such, the admixture of documentary and festival “presents
an intriguing and unique contact zone that combines the first two founda-
tional, or traditional, festival elements with a third: that is, business, art
and activism” (Winton in Robbins and Saglier 2015). Whereas at grass-
roots and community-oriented festivals such as those found listed in the
Radical Film Network directory,5 or activism-oriented festivals such as the
numerous Human Rights Film Festivals, the second aspect of the docu-
mentary festival triad—socio-political—is omnipresent, examples of ban-
ishment or containment of activism at mainstream festivals abound.6 While
this book doesn’t focus on those festivals whose main aim is bolstering
political action, several chapters address the socio-political dimension of
festivals, including a close reading of institutionalized festivals (such as
Hot Docs, see Ezra Winton this volume), the exploration of grassroots
initiatives led by filmmakers (such as Vikalp in India, see Battaglia this
volume), and an examination of the historic evolution in some festivals
from political commitment to more industrial agendas (such as Nyon, see
Jungen this volume).
Thirdly, we approach the specificities of documentary festivals in rela-

tion to genre distinctions, which are therefore differentiated from fiction
festivals. The development of feature-length documentary in the digital
era has provided an arena for documentary to gain prominence over other
minor-genres—such as short and experimental film—with which docu-
mentary had traditionally shared festival space at minor festivals (see
Vallejo, this volume). As many examples of documentary festivals’ origins
attest, this shift in documentary format can be interpreted as both cause
and consequence of the rising of a network of specialized festivals that
focus exclusively on the documentary genre. At the same time, documen-
tary hybridization with other genres—including experimental, animation
and fiction film—has facilitated the increasing presence of feature-
documentaries at major festivals (see Iglesias 2020, in our second vol-
ume). While this doesn’t necessarily threaten documentary festivals’ very
existence, it means that premieres are taken away from the specialized
circuit (Vallejo, this volume). Moreover, the contesting practices of fiction
and documentary festivals towards labelling or not labelling a film as doc-
umentary illustrate the ways in which film festivals contribute to defining
the genre.
Finally, documentary film festivals have positioned themselves in rela-
tion to mass media, and more specifically, to television formats and dis-
courses about actuality. In this context, documentary festivals present
alternative approaches to both current affairs and the historical past.
Documentary, with few exceptions, has staked out its territory mostly on
the peripheries of mainstream culture, and as such it has historically
shared more in common with alternative media than any notion of what
constitutes mainstream cinema (Winton Forthcoming). With this in mind,
when documentary meets festival, two co-existing ontologies emerge: the
first manifests as the intersection of “alternative” and “mainstream” (as in
a documentary that plays at a commercial festival like TIFF); the second as
the parallel intersection of documentary and festival, bundled in an institu-
tion and event that exclusively privileges and engages documentary film
(these events, known as documentary film festivals, manifest along differ-
ent points of the spectrum of alternative and mainstream, with some
decidedly community-oriented, aesthetic-oriented and some decidedly
commercial-oriented). It is these two latter aspects that we mostly address
in both volumes of this collection.
Following this definitional undertaking, we have selected our case studies
according to their international relevance, historical interest, global diversity
and institutional differences. Our interest in how the festival ecosystem

affects the documentary form has also led us to include analyses of gener-
alist film festivals, or those not specialized in documentary (Vallejo, this
volume; Iglesias 2020, in our second volume). Chapters in this book
address a wide range of events labelled as documentary festivals, while also
leaving others out. Although the political aspects of documentary film
festivals are certainly a driving force for many of the chapters in this vol-
ume, this collection also offers a markedly different approach, as it doesn’t
orient around thematic festivals but to those classified by genre, therefore
addressing the most relevant documentary festivals worldwide—such as
Yamagata or Hot Docs.7 Despite their importance for documentary exhi-
bition, we do not pointedly address thematic festivals that focus on human
rights, political activism or environmental issues, which together can be
considered as a sub-circuit of their own. This is because, as we noted ear-
lier, there are already publications that cover those festivals; and because
we wanted to approach the documentary as a genre with its own aesthetic
and ontological features, and as a space for cinematic experimentation in
which the notion of “creative documentary” now most recently prevails as
a defining identity. Documentary films are therefore considered not only
as “documents” of reality and their social dimensions but also as an art
form, a fruitful (and more affordable) alternative for peripheral cinemas
and as a practice that has its own production, distribution and exhibition
channels. It is the aim of our two volumes to approach the subject from
these different angles.
We hope the key points we have highlighted bring us closer to defining
the documentary film festival in all its dressings and contradictions.
Regardless, we are confident the following chapters will certainly assist in
these efforts, and it is to summarizing that content we now wish to
briefly turn.
Structure and Contents

The book opens with a conversation with renowned documentary film
scholar Bill Nichols, who reflects on the relationships between film festi-
vals and documentary film. Rather than providing definitive answers, the
interview introduces relevant topics and opens up new questions about
the possibilities for the study of documentary film festivals, such as the
relationship between academia and film festivals, the role of documentary
festivals in defining and shaping this genre and the future of this field of
study. Built on Nichols’s recollections and personal insights, this genera-

tive discussion raises issues that are interrogated in later chapters, which
sometimes share or contest his opinions about contemporary documen-
tary practice and its exhibition contexts.
This first volume is divided into three parts, each prefaced by a short
introduction that frames different properties of the documentary festival
phenomenon: its methodological implications, history and political role.
Contemporary festival challenges, industrial developments and profes-
sional concerns are the focus of the second volume Documentary Film
Festivals Vol. 2: Changes, Challenges, Professional Perspectives.
Part I herein, “Research and Methods”, brings into focus some of the
problems faced when researching film festivals, addressing the selection of
research topics and methods, as well as archiving practices. Film Festival
Research Network co-founder Skadi Loist reflects on methodological
issues through a review of academic workshops celebrated since 2009.
Heather Barnes, a specialist on moving image preservation, offers a discus-
sion about the different kinds of data collection and recording practices
carried out by film festivals. She proposes the example of the collaboration
between the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and Duke University
as a possible model to follow for archival purposes.
Part II, “Histories and Origins”, includes chapters that provide a his-
torical overview of the development of the international documentary fes-
tival ecosystem. Firstly, Aida Vallejo proposes a chronological reconstruction
of the presence of documentary at film festivals throughout the twentieth
century and the beginning of twenty-first century, identifying different
periods and reflecting on the conformation of the documentary canon.
The next three chapters deepen the specificities of each of these periods
through the study of specific case studies. Dunja Jelenković analyzes the
Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival, an example of the special-
ized festivals that appeared in the 1950s. She investigates the politicization
of festival programming parallel to war discourse in Yugoslavia using
World War II motif to feed the conflict, and reflects on the importance of
cultural history to understand wider historical processes. Christian Jungen
focuses on the shifts brought about by the end of the 1960s through a
study of Nyon International Documentary Film Festival’s origins. He
retraces the professional trajectory of its founder, Moritz de Hadeln, and
reflects on his participation in the international cultural elite that
programmed film festivals in a period marked by clashing ideologies.

Closing this section, Eija Niskanen focuses on the 1980s with a historical
analysis of the positioning of the Yamagata International Documentary

Film Festival within the global network of documentary festivals, and
rooted in Japanese and Asian documentary traditions.
Part III, “Politics and Policies”, looks at more recent phenomena,
focusing on the political aspects currently faced by documentary film festi-
vals and their relationship with the state and public policies that either
constrain or foster their activities. Tit Leung Cheung reflects on censorship
at the festival DOChina in Beijing. He discusses the difference between
independent and underground practices, framing programming, produc-
tion and exhibition practices in the context of governmental intervention-
ism. Ezra Winton looks at the dynamics of the most influential documentary
festival in North America: Toronto’s Hot Docs. He offers a study on the
increasing commercialization of this big-audience festival and the conse-
quences for activism. Giulia Battaglia focuses on the Indian context through
a study of the Vikalp festival/campaign, which was organized by indepen-
dent filmmakers as a reaction to state censorship in that country, and points
to the importance of new communication technologies and social media
for the development of professional networks. The last contribution by
Antía López-Gómez, Aida Vallejo, Mª Soliña Barreiro and Amanda Alencar
expands the sphere of Film Festival Studies to the field of Small Cinemas
and linguistic minorities. Through a study of the European Union’s poli-
cies to promote a multilingual audio-visual space, they focus on the use of
subtitles and Original Version in the documentary festival sphere.
Conclusions
The multi-faceted nature of film festivals is a key aspect of their operation,
and is summarily explored at length in our two volumes. Although in this
book we devote a whole section to historical forays, all chapters in both
volumes are aimed at offering general frameworks that help readers under-
stand the historical context in which each festival has developed, especially
within a specific region and/or socio-cultural context. Equally, politics
appears as a leitmotiv not only in Part III of this volume but also through-
out most chapters of this collection, lending evidence to the specificity of
documentary as a place for activism and social change (whether realized or
not). Aesthetics, although without a section of its own, is key to the dif-
ferent filmic aspects analyzed throughout the text, especially in the frame
of what has been considered a creative turn in documentary film in recent
years. Directors and films mentioned throughout these two volumes
c ontribute not only to an expansion of the documentary canon but also to

frame the genre in contexts of exhibition, while foregrounding the impor-
tance of documentary film festivals in the shaping of new documentary
forms worldwide.
This text is just a first step towards a more comprehensive understand-
ing of not only what documentary festivals are or could be, but also where,
when and how they arrived at their current states. The following pages,
taken together, serve as an invitation to go beyond the casual-spectator
role and adopt a more active and critical positioning towards festivals. In
short, we invite readers to join us to assess, discuss, interrogate and cele-
brate documentary cinema at the site of the film festival.
Notes
1. Read past and current journal articles from Jump Cut here: https://www.
ejumpcut.org/.
2. The entire series, which the University of Minnesota has discontinued, is
featured here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/series/visible-
evidence. Visible Evidence is also an annual conference that is held through-
out the world and brings together documentary practitioners and scholars.
3. See some references about the oldest documentary festivals in the world in
Vallejo, this volume.
4. After facing censorship from the German Embassy in France—which pro-
posed to withdraw the film from the Cannes Film Festival—French print
media supported the inclusion of the film in the programme.
5. Link: http://radicalfilmnetwork.com/directory/.
6. A recent example at TIFF 2014 involved a Yes Men prank against the
Canadian financial institution Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), incidentally
one of the festival’s main sponsors. The festival reacted by threatening to
cancel screenings of the Yes Men documentary, which was incidentally fea-
tured at the festival that year. For more, see: Winton (2020a).
7. IDFA is mostly addressed in our second volume (Vallejo and Winton 2020).
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Defining Documentary in the Festival
Circuit: A Conversation with Bill Nichols
Aida Vallejo
Internationally renowned film scholar Bill Nichols is undoubtedly a key

referent for documentary studies. In his seminal work Representing
Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1991), he offers sapient
reflections about the significance, ethics and aesthetics of the genre, which
he further develops in Blurred Boundaries (Nichols 1994a), Introduction
to Documentary (2001) and Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics,
Politics in Documentary (2016). In these works, Nichols refers to four
main aspects which contribute to the articulation of a definition of docu-
mentary: a community of practitioners, an institutional framework, a cor-
pus of texts and a constituency of viewers (1991, 12–31). Festivals
represent a nodal point where these agents gather and negotiate the mean-
ing of documentary, and therefore offer a critical aspect of film culture
that must be taken into account for a better understanding of the genre.
Nevertheless, these events have a timid presence in Nichols’ work, a rea-
son why we consider that his further reflections on this topic can shed
some light on the current developments in the study of the relationships
between text and context in the formation of documentary cultures.
A. Vallejo (*)
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Leioa, Spain
e-mail: aida.vallejo@ehu.eus
© The Author(s) 2020 19

A. Vallejo, E. Winton (eds.), Documentary Film Festivals Vol. 1,
Framing Film Festivals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17320-3_2
20 A. VALLEJO
Nevertheless, a lesser-known aspect of Nichols’ contribution to Film

Studies is his work on film festivals published in the 1990s. Two of his
articles that appeared in 1994, “Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning”
(1994b) and “Global Image Consumption in the Age of Late Capitalism”
(1994c), have been recently rescued by Film Festival Studies scholars and
have been widely referenced, or even reprinted (Iordanova 2013, 29–44,
see Nichols 1994c). Nichols’ expertise and reflections are therefore of key
importance to incipient scholarship that aims to investigate the intersec-
tions of film festivals and documentary film. In the following conversation,
Nichols reveals his insights into the past, present and future for the study
of documentary film festivals.
Aida Vallejo: How did you come to the topic of film festivals as aca-
demic objects of study in your pioneering articles written in
the 1990s?1
Bill Nichols: Well, a few years earlier I had written Representing Reality
and then I was working on Blurred Boundaries. That was a period of time
when I was working quite a bit with Visual Anthropology. I was very inter-
ested in ethnographic questions, and the film festival site just struck me as
one that I was going to often, as well as visiting various countries to give
talks, like China, which was a very vivid example in 1986. The late 1980s
was a very transformative period, when an early wave of western film theo-
rists visited China at a point when most Chinese filmmakers had not seen
western films. And it got me thinking that we used the festival as the site
to import knowledge, as if you are going to a library. I was taking it for
granted, not thinking about what it is like to be in a festival. I was think-
ing: What can I get from the festival? Information, facts, new film titles,
repertoire, meeting people …. And I think that the ethnographic context
I was working in stimulated me to reflect that we need to think about the
festival as a very peculiar kind of culture, like another country, like a
regional or distinct subculture. And then I had a chance to go to the
Toronto International Film Festival that year (1993), and the festival had
chosen to show Iranian films, and I thought: Oh, this is the perfect test-
case! But I think that, particularly in the article published in the East-West
Journal (on the global context), I was trying to think about what the film
festival does to constitute a particular kind of reception, a particular audi-
ence and a culture that is distinct to it and that hasn’t been looked at.
Now, as you say, it’s becoming a “hot topic.”
DEFINING DOCUMENTARY IN THE FESTIVAL CIRCUIT: A CONVERSATION… 21
And what is, in your opinion, the reason for this recent interest from
academia? Why did film festivals become a “hot topic”?
Well, after I wrote those articles I don’t remember much further discussion.
But more recently people were starting groups; informal connections devel-
oped, and books started to come up. You know, it was a little bit of a surprise!
Because it was like: Oh! And what happened for 20 years? I thought that I
myself might do some more with that idea. I remember Jeffrey Ruoff, who was
pursuing some questions about the festival audience and festivals, and apart
from him it didn’t seem to be creating much interest. Part of the reason may be
that festivals themselves have become so plentiful. I’m thinking here in San
Francisco right this week we have the San Francisco International Film Festival,
one of the oldest in the United States. But, almost every week in San Francisco
there is a film festival. It seems that there are festivals spawning everywhere, and
I think that’s part of the stimulus, the festival phenomenon itself.
Given your expertise, I was wondering why you didn’t develop this
interest in festivals also for those specializing in documentary?
That’s a good question. I think at that point I didn’t think of documen-

tary film festivals as a separate category. I had been to some, but it didn’t
seem like a prominent enough phenomenon to really draw my attention.
And I think my interest had always been primarily on the films and contex-
tualizing films, groups of films, looking at their formal qualities, and their
relation to social issues, and the larger questions about the industry, about
production, distribution, marketing. Festivals seemed like something that
others might have more expertise on.
So, when I wrote those articles I felt very much like I was stepping into
new water, and maybe others who were more familiar with that would get
in their boats and paddle further than I could, but it didn’t happen quickly.
It wasn’t right on the top of my agenda. Although it seems that it is now!
And how do you see the influence of film festivals in the creation of a
film canon? To what extent do they influence the inclusion of spe-
cific documentaries in film history?
When you go back to the early 1990s when I wrote those pioneering
books, the main book that I remember that most people referred to in
discussions about documentary was Erik Barnow’s History of Documentary
(1993). And that was based on his personal experience, on the films he
had seen through archives, and on filmmakers. And I don’t think festivals
22 A. VALLEJO
played a very large role. Certainly he doesn’t talk about them, even though
there were documentary festivals during that period. But I think he helped
to set a tone, and it is not a criticism—looking for films that were either
exemplary in their form or speaking to significant issues.
For me, in that period the festival was a kind of support structure, and a
secondary one. I remember back in the 1970s going to the San Francisco
Film Festival. My friends and I watched films from morning to night, but
probably only a handful of documentaries. I remember Painters Painting by
Emile de Antonio (1972), and in the press conference one of the artists in
the film said “stop talking to these people—meaning the press in the room—
they don’t understand what you are doing; you are wasting your time.”
That was almost symbolic of the idea of discussing documentary at all.
Because most film-goers were not interested in documentary. But there was
a strong divide, and the idea was that documentaries are factual, they deal
with the “truth,” with true issues in a real way, and they’re often boring.
And in the late 1980s the appearance of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me
(1989) was like: “Oh my god! There is a film that can play in theatres and
make millions. We have to pay attention to this.” And The Thin Blue Line
(Errol Morris, 1988) came out around the same time, and I think that the
effect of both films was like a flag going up on a pole saying: “From now on,
documentaries are not to be ignored. You have to learn to understand them,
you have to ask about them, and you will need to know something about
them.” And we are having the San Francisco International Film Festival
going on right now, and not only are there quite a number of documenta-
ries in it, but they are highlighted. That would never have happened 20 or
30 years ago. Now some documentaries get more attention than the fea-
tures. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous and Christine
Cynn, 2012), like Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956) for similar reasons—
both are dealing with atrocious crimes—has generated that kind of buzz.
And do you think that nowadays festivals are still secondary to the
creation of the canon?
Well, Sundance has always been used as an example. If you get a lot of
exposure at Sundance, maybe you can get a distribution deal. And this is
true for both fiction and documentary. I think that’s one of the roles festi-
vals have played. If you can make a film that catches the attention in the
festival circuit, whether it is the big circuit—Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and
so on—or in a more secondary circuit, maybe New York and San Francisco
… Sundance is somewhere in between …. That is a way to get to the mar-
ketplace. And in that sense, the festivals act as gatekeepers for what films get
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
An Ancient Aboriginal Encampment.
A group of Eskimo on the site of an ancient encampment of the Tooneet, or aborigines of that
country. Tooneet used to build their houses of large stones filled in with moss. They were small
but very strong, and are now, as far as can be known, extinct.
The deer feed in a peculiar manner. Once a pit has been sunk in the snow and
the moss at the bottom is browsed down, the creatures do not attempt to
enlarge the place, but scramble out again, only to dig a fresh hole and sink
shoulder high in it at a little distance, and begin feeding afresh. The herd is
always dogged by a pack of watchful wolves, ever on the qui [41]vive to attack;
but the leaders’ vigilance never slackens, and battle breaks out in the wild at the
first movement of aggression.
There are one or two particularly interesting facts, astronomical and otherwise,
which account for the extraordinary physical phenomena and conditions of life in
the polar regions. To begin with the seasons. The “Arctic” properly so called is
geographically defined by that circle of latitude where the sun on midwinter day
does not rise, and where on midsummer day it does not set. In Arctic countries
the sun is never more than 23½ degrees above the horizon, and their intense
cold is due, in summer, to the sharp obliquity of his rays, and in winter, to his
entire absence. In the latitude of Blacklead Island, on December 25th, the whole
orb of the sun is not visible, only the upper section shows above the horizon
(unless mist or snow overcast the heavens) for a brief ten minutes at midday. On
May 18th, conversely, the sun has been noted as shining for eighteen hours, the
remaining six out of the twenty-four being a bright twilight, scarcely
distinguishable from day.
The whole year round there is little to be seen but rocks and snow. No tilling,
sowing, harvesting, mark the progress of the seasons or call man to the pursuits
which have brought all civilisation in their train in milder climes. These seasons
(which depend, of course, upon the position of the earth in its orbit round the
sun, and upon the inclination of the polar [42]axis to the plane of the ecliptic
giving a six month’s day and six month’s night at the poles), are markedly
defined in Baffin Land. But far more distinctly so on shore than at sea, where
unbroken ice may reign supreme throughout the greater part of the twelve-
month. Winter sets in on the southern coast about the end of September; farther
north a week or two earlier. By this date the hills are getting their snow caps,
which extend downwards every day, and a thin sheet of ice appears upon the
sea at night. A rim of ice along the shore marks the rise and fall of the tide.
Frequent snowstorms now set in, and the ice at sea thickens and strengthens,
until by November it extends as far as the eye can rove. This ice, however, is not
stout or welded enough to bear sleds, except in the fiords and smaller bays, until
nearly Christmas time. The sea freezes when the temperature of the air falls to
about 15° F., and the whole surface of the water becomes covered with a mass
of ice spicules known to polar sailors as Bay Ice, from its forming first in the bays
of the coast. Presently this solidifies and thickens, growing ever whiter and more
translucent in the process, and is broken, even in calm weather, by the action of
gentle swell or the currents beneath into thousands of discs, large and small,
like pans of ice. Sea ice is formed at a temperature of 3° F. below the freezing
point of fresh water. There are many remarkable and interesting physical
distinctions between ice formed on land and ice formed at sea. The latter when
melted is quite drinkable, [43]being not nearly so salt as salt water. The intense
cold, though, of drinking water so obtained tends to inflame the mucous
membrane of the mouth and throat, and its slight salinity still further augments
thirst; so it is never resorted to except of necessity. These pans eventually
freeze together into one great solid floor of “pancake ice,” and the Eskimo, away
hunting in the winter for seal, may camp and live for weeks, miles out from land
on the frozen sea.
The days grow ever shorter and shorter until, in midwinter, there may be only a
few hours or even minutes of daylight left. The long Arctic night lasts from
September to March.
By the end of March, however, the sun is once more high in the heavens; the
sudden spring has begun, and the sound is everywhere heard of water trickling
under the snow. Readers of Alaskan romance will recall many a fine passage
about the ice “going out” on the Yukon, and realise the terrific transformation
undergone by the whole still, silent, rigid, frozen landscape when the iron bonds
of winter at length give way. Springtime in the Arctics is a wonderful time. The
thaw comes from below. The rocks take the heat, and the snow sinks down,
baring more and more of them every day. It grows quite warm; bird sounds
(ptarmigan and snow bunting) enliven all the day; ducks quack at the floe edge.
Sunrise beams upon the Arctic hills until they lie smiling in the full beauty of
sunshine on their mantles of untrodden snow. [44]
At the end of June, summer is come; the sun is really hot, and the long-covered
earth, bared at last to its benign influence, puts forth heather and grass and
flowers. For six months there is no more night. Its place is taken by the pale light
that offers so strange a phenomenon to the dweller from the south. If the sky be
unclouded, shadows will be seen pointing to the south. If clouds cover the
heavens, the landscape stands out without shadow at all, clear and sharp under
this strange illumination. There is no one point from which the light can come; it
comes from everywhere. Owing to the length of this Arctic “day,” the ground has
no time to radiate away the welcome warmth, hence the rapid growth of what
vegetation the region may show. Again, as Nansen says so poetically: “In these
regions the heavens count for more than elsewhere: they give colour and
character … to the landscape … it is flooded with that melancholy light which
soothes the soul so fondly and is so characteristic of the northern night.”
The stars are an open book to the Eskimo. They know all the principal groups,
and use them for the directing of their journeys. They can make a very creditable
chart of the northern heavens. They recognise the Plough, and the Bear (which
is indeed called “Nanook”—the Bear), and they recognise the constellation of
three stars in a straight line and at equal distances from each other, which they
call the “Runners,” and describe as the spirits of three [45]brothers in pursuit. The
arctic hunters are marvellous students of nature generally. They have the lore of
the wild at their finger tips, and all the wisdom of the seasons. It is probable that
this primitive people have preserved nearly all the original instincts—as to the
presence of danger, right direction, etc., etc.—of primaeval man, which are all
but extinct in the over-civilisation of the modern European.
In August autumn begins. Last year’s ice has been broken up and carried far out
to sea. There are frequent showers of rain, and the nights begin again to
encroach more and more on the day. It is about this time that the trading ships
generally arrive and put in at various points along the coast to do business and
refit. They pick up the annual intelligence of the whaling stations, and leave for
home as soon as the new ice begins to form.
Then winter comes down upon the land once more. The sky, like velvet, is
bespangled with stars of incomparable brilliance, burning like opals. The
Northern Lights, like lambent curtains of amazing illumination, swing weirdly
through the sky; the blanched hills and the frozen fiords stand out in ghostly
black and white under the startling moonlight. There is no sound save the sharp
cracking of rock or ice under the strain of the intense frost, the uneasy growl of
dogs, the distant howl of a wolf.
Suddenly, however, there may be a chorus of barking in the night, as a strange

team of dogs sweeps into view up the fiord, or the harbour, and visitors
[46]descend upon the camp. Except for the noise, one could imagine the
newcomers to be the ghosts of ancient hunters haunting their old grounds. But
cheery cries, the crack of whips and the howls of the dogs, dispel any such idea
as the group comes up. They are stalwart and sturdy individuals enough, clad
from head to foot in deerskin, and covered with rime and frost. They are seeking
hospitality here, and at once friendly doors are open to them, invitations are
readily extended and accepted, and soon everyone of the strangers is
comfortably bestowed (after Eskimo notions of comfort) in one or another of the
various dwellings, the dogs are unharnessed and fed, and peace resumes her
tranquil sway.
The natives thus name the four seasons: Opingrak, spring; Auyak, summer;
Okeoksak, autumn (i.e., material for winter), and Okeok, winter. The months are
named by the sequence of events—the coming of the ducks, the birth of the
reindeer fawns, the coming of the fish (sea trout), etc., as “the duck month,” “the
fawn month,” “the fish month,” etc. And the days are distinguished as “oblo,” to-
day; “koukpât,” to-morrow; “ikpuksâk,” yesterday; “ikpuksâne,” the day before
yesterday, and so forth. “Akkâgo” means next year, and “akkâne” is last year. [47]
[Contents]
CHAPTER III
Arctic Flora and Fauna
Another striking feature of the Arctics is the effect upon the

appearance and character of those shores touched by the Gulf
Stream, as compared with those where its waters never pass. Thus
the coast of Greenland is comparatively luxuriant in vegetation and
its seas teem with fish, while Baffin Land, opposite, washed by arctic
currents, is desolate and barren, with no fishing off its shores. The
same contrast holds good with respect to the north and south coasts
of Hudson Strait. There are no cod off Baffin Land, but the Labrador
fishermen ply their trade right into Hudson Bay.
Baffin “Island” is a trackless, mysterious continent where, high up on

the summits of some of the mountains, there are vast lakes fed from
hidden springs—or from streams from still higher ranges—wherein
salmon trout abound! At least, these fish are exactly like the sea
trout which come up the rivers every year to spawn, save that the
hue of the belly is bright red. The Eskimo point to this as proof that
they never go down to the sea, and call them the “dirty fish,” since
they never quit the lakes. How they ever [48]got into them is a
mystery the arctic zoölogist must be left to solve, since neither
hunter nor fisherman can offer a suggestion. The trout could not
have attained any such level upstream. It would almost appear—if
one might hazard a guess—that at some remote geologic epoch this
part of the N. American continent was submerged, for the Eskimo of
Baffin Land speak of an inland sea, now dry, where fossil remains
are to be found of large creatures such as the whale and walrus.
They come across fossil fish, indeed, in their more extended
wanderings, also shells, and bring them back to camp as curiosities.
The Eskimo are properly a seaboard people and seldom penetrate
farther inland than thirty miles from the coast, unless during the
annual deer hunt, when they may be away for a couple of months,
according to the distance the quest may take them.
Possibly these unaccountable trout are the descendants of fish cut

off from access to the sea, when the gradual rise of the continental
level left lakes of originally salt water among the ranges. Where they
are not without marine life (excepting those wonderful seaweeds
which are found at the tropics as well as in the arctic), the waters
round these shores contain many species of fish commonly known
elsewhere, only in a much less developed state. Such creatures as
sea anemones, shrimps, sea snails, small squid, and salt water
centipedes, are to be found on the arctic beach. Naturalists
enumerate a formidable list of the sort, bristling with scientific
nomenclature. Then [49]there are the mosquitoes, of which more
anon, and small yellow, white and brown butterflies. It is indeed due
to the comparatively rich fauna and flora of the arctic regions, both
east and west, that arctic exploration has been carried out so
frequently. The utter absence of plant or animal or human life in the
dead antarctic has greatly militated against the success of
southbound expeditions.
To deal with the mosquitoes! These insects abound in the summer-

time, and are a terrible pest. It is a puzzle how they survive the
winter, when everything is frozen solid, and the very spots which
thaw under the sudden warmth of an arctic spring and allow them to
swarm out in their malignant millions are iron-bound as the rocks
themselves for the greater part of the year. So formidable are these
insects that man himself has sometimes fallen a victim to their
onslaught. On one occasion, a polar bear was crossing a swamp on
the prowl, when he was attacked by mosquitoes. They stung his
eyes, the inside of his ears, penetrated his nostrils and stung them.
As the nasal passages became inflamed and swollen, the bear was
forced to open his mouth to breathe, when his enemies swarmed in,
fastened on to tongue, palate and throat, causing them also to swell,
until the tormented brute succumbed to suffocation. His howls
attracted the attention of some Eskimo hunters, who afterwards told
the tale.
Another time, some women in a summer camp noticed a kyak (skin

canoe) drifting about at sea in [50]a curious way, and a man went off
to investigate. On arriving within hail he found a body in the canoe,
leaning back stone dead; done to death in precisely the same way
by mosquitoes.
Arctic birds are numerous. Most of them are migratory, but an eagle,
a hawk, some owls and a raven, remain the year round. The most
typical of all Arctic birds, the Snow Bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis), is
the first to arrive and bring news of the spring. He comes about the
same time as the Ptarmigan. Lastly comes the bird that always
seems to greet the explorer on landing, the Purple Sandpiper (Tringa
striata). He comes soon after the ducks—the Eider, the King Eider,
the Pintail and the Harlequin. Between the two, there is a rapid
vernal succession of birds, including sea pigeons and geese.
Eskimo hunters speak of the wild swan, on the south coast and in
the vicinity of Frobisher Bay. The raven is the only arctic bird which
does not change its plumage to match the surroundings. He is
always aggressively, blatantly black. Possibly, being so able a match
for any ordinary foe, this bird has no need to adopt the “protective
resemblance” of white. The writer has watched a raven alight to
secure some tit-bit of offal, and keep even the wolfish Eskimo dog at
a respectful distance, with its huge beak. The bird is cunning to a
degree. It will follow a trapper, note the position of his traps, and
return to visit and despoil them of their bait as soon as the coast is
clear. Then it takes up its stand on some convenient rock [51]just out
of gunshot range, and watches the trapper on his return, just for all
the world as if it relished his comments!
So much for the land birds. At sea there are petrels, gulls, and
skuas. The natives do not recognise pictures of puffins or penguins,
as these birds are not known on their coasts.
Again, the animals of the frozen north form quite a formidable list.
There are three large lakes in Baffin Land (shown on the map at the
end), linked together by rivers and making connection with the sea
by river.
The southern lake is called “Angmakjuak” (“the great one”). The

length of this sea may indeed exceed 120 miles by 40 in breadth in
its central part. The central lake, “Tesseyuakjuak,” is possibly 140
miles long by 60 broad, and the northern lake “Netselik” (the place of
seals) is at least 15 miles across. The difference in level between
these great sheets of water is so inconsiderable that the natives can
paddle with ease either up or down the waterways connecting them;
perhaps none of them lie much higher than 300 feet above the sea.
They teem with seal coming up from the coasts, and on the shores
of Netselik old hunters will tell you they have seen the Red Fox, as
well as white and smoky. This may well be so, as the fox is a denizen
of Labrador, and might easily cross Hudson Strait on the ice during a
hard winter. The seal of these lakes and of the coast (much hunted
for food and for their skins by the [52]natives), are the grey haired
seals of wide-spread commerce, but not the fine, fur-bearing animals
whose pelts are of the first beauty and value. This latter is a different
species and is protected by Government, only a certain number
being allowed to be killed each year.
Bears, of course, abound. The female is the only arctic land creature
which hibernates. Then there is the wolf, the white and blue fox, 1 the
ermine, the arctic hare, a tailless snow mouse, or lemming, the musk
ox, and—the most widely distributed of all—the cariboo or reindeer
(Rangifer tarandus). It would be impossible to over-estimate the
value of the last named beautiful creature, alive or dead, to all the
peoples of the arctic countries, east or west. It would be superfluous
here to remark much about it, except to note one interesting
peculiarity. The reindeer differs from all other deer in that both sexes
bear antlers.
The wolves, of course, are the inveterate enemies of the deer. In the
winter, when the latter herds leave the lowlands and go up to pasture
among the hills, where the snow lies less deep and can be more
easily scratched away, they are dogged by the wolves. These hungry
and voracious creatures know well enough that the deer are
sentinelled while feeding by their fighting males, and make no
movement of aggression until one of them chances to stray from
[53]the herd. When this happens, the luckless animal is immediately
headed off towards the shore and hunted down. The wolfish pack
concentrates behind it and draws in on either side, so as to leave but
one avenue of apparent escape. The quarry dashes down and away,
out on towards the ice; but its weight is so great and its hoofs so
sharp that the frozen crust of snow gives way beneath it and sorely
cuts it about the legs. The deer loses blood and slackens in speed,
so that the wolves, skimming easily over the treacherous surface,
close in and soon drag it down.
It is a fact well known to the Eskimo hunter that the actual chase is
put up by the female wolf, the male only coming in at the last, for the
kill. The former do the hustling and placing of the victim, as it were,
and the latter do the fighting and killing at the end.
The Lemming (Cuniculus torquatus) is a queer typical little arctic

animal. It has a chubby build, a rudimentary tail, and no external
ears. The first toe of the forepaw is almost nil, but the third and fourth
have very strong claws, which grow longer and still more powerful in
winter. It is grey in summer and white for the rest of the year. It lives
upon the grubs to be found amid the moss under the snow, and
burrows its way along as it searches for food. It is quite a familiar
sound to hear the scratch, scratch, scratch of a lemming’s claws
beneath, as one lies on the snow sleeping bench of an Eskimo’s
igloo. The creature’s skin when dried is used by the natives for
sticking over cuts or boils. It is hunted in the spring by the [54]women
and children, who are guided by the sound of its burrowings. They
arm themselves with a stick having a long barbed wire attached, and
spear the animal with this through the snow.
Around the coasts there are various species of whales. The

Grampus (Orca gladiator) or killer, as it is called by the whalers, is a
fierce member of the dolphin group, sometimes attaining a length of
thirty feet, with large powerful teeth, from ten to thirteen in number,
on each side of the jaw. It has a high, upstanding fin on the back, like
a shark. It is very swift in the water and can easily overtake and kill
one of these latter creature. It is shunned and feared by all the
denizens of the arctic seas except the Walrus and the great Sperm
Whale. The Grampus is incredibly voracious, and has been known to
devour thirteen porpoises and fourteen seals at one meal.
All the smaller animals take refuge in shallow water inshore at the
approach of a Killer, only to fall a prey there to the native. The Killers
hunt the whalebone whale, which, fast though it is, cannot make
good its escape. The pursuers will leap right out of the water and
crash down upon the head of their victim; or rush upon it and ram it,
until terrified, stunned and exhausted, the whale drops its jaw, when
the Killers tear out huge pieces of the tongue. (The tongue of a
whale is a vast mass of fat, weighing in a full sized animal as much
as a ton.) Finally, the unwieldly carcase is also despatched, and the
Grampuses take themselves off, replete. The male Walrus [55]is too
active and fierce to be beset in this manner, but a female
encumbered with a calf will often be pursued by the Killer. She takes
the young one under her flipper and tries to escape; but the
aggressor rushes in and butts at her. Sometimes he succeeds in
claiming this tender mouthful; sometimes he is killed by the infuriated
mother.
The Sea Unicorn or Narwhal (Monodon monoceros), is a purely

arctic animal. The curious “horn” is really the left tooth grown to the
length of six or seven feet. It is only hollow for a certain distance.
Exteriorly this horn is spirally grooved, to allow presumably for quick
thrust and withdrawal. The Narwhal often engage in a mock combat
among themselves with these horns, but use them with fierce and
deadly precision when engaged in actual warfare.
It were too long to linger here with the creatures of the North, since
we shall meet them all, and many more, in dealing with the human
inhabitants of the country. Arctic animals have a fascination all their
own, and of late years a wonderfully sympathetic and intuitive
literature has grown up having them almost exclusively for its
protagonists. Jack London has endeared the powerful, savage,
husky dog to us for all time, in his “White Fang.” [56]
Occasionally the black fox is taken, and the fortunate hunter may receive as
1
much as the equivalent of $100 to $500 for a pair of fine skins, from the
Agent. ↑
[Contents]
CHAPTER IV
The Eskimo
The inhabitants of the Arctic are the Eskimo, also written Esquimaux,
Usquemows, called by themselves Innuit (Innuk s. Innooeet p.) or the “people.”
The word Usquemow is Indian, meaning raw flesh eaters. The English and
Scotch anglicised it to Eskimo. The name “Husky” as applied to the native is
merely slang, a corruption of Eskimo perpetrated by men whose ears and
tongues were untrained to the language—whalers who sometimes employed the
tribesmen in their hunting, and dubbed them with the first jargon name that
came handy. It is still used in this sense in localities where Europeans are
numerous, such as Alaska, and Hudson Bay.
Part of an Eskimo Tribe of Women and Children.
With their outside jackets off, the inner jackets showing the ornamentations of beadwork.
Pure blood Indians do not penetrate so far north as the Eskimo territories, being
denizens of the forest but not of the barrens. The Eskimo are a kindly, intelligent
people, hardy to a degree. They follow the manner of life and the pursuits of
primitive man; but when brought into contact with the whites and with civilisation,
show themselves by no means incapable of assimilating a good deal of
instruction. They have qualities of amiability, hospitality, ingenuity and
[57]endurance, which all travellers have agreed in extolling; although here and
there in the records of the voyages of exploration in the nineteenth century we
also find unfavourable comments passed upon them. They exist in small,
scattered tribes along the sea coasts, whence they derive the bulk of their
subsistence. Owing to the establishment of whaling and other stations, the
geographical areas of the tribes are now more circumscribed and confined than
they used to be, as each station is a centre of trade where most of the
necessaries of life can be obtained.
The origin of the Eskimo is a matter of ethnographical conjecture. They

themselves had no written language until comparatively few years ago, and
depended upon oral tradition for their history. And even to-day it is only the few
who have been taught to read and write, so that legend still holds sway
throughout the greater part of Baffin Land, Cockburn Land, and the rest. Their
past is lost in obscurity. In the obscurity perhaps of that neolithic or “reindeer
age” of which their life, even now, has so often been cited as a close replica.
That immense span of time in the history of the human race known as the Stone
Age, falls into five divisions. There is the Palaeolithic period (Early, Middle and
Late), and the Neolithic period (Transitional and Typical). During the last throes
of the glacial epoch in Europe, the type of human being was that represented by
the relic which has come down to us known as the Neanderthal skull. But the
later [58]Pleistocene period saw a greater diversity in the matter of types, and
one race in particular is represented by a fair number of specimens. They
denote a good-looking, purely human being. Another race of the same period is
represented by a single specimen only. It is known as the Chancelade Race,
and “the skeleton, of comparatively low stature, is deemed to show close
affinities to the type of the modern Eskimo.” (Dr. Marett.) This is exceedingly
interesting as giving us some idea of the antiquity of the stock, and as showing
how glacial conditions in prehistoric times in Europe produced a type which
lingers on amid the races of the modern world in the still existing glacial epoch of
the Arctic.
The “Reindeer men” of prehistoric times lived lives no harder in the bleak climate
and unprogressive conditions of glaciated Europe than those of the Eskimo in
glaciated America to-day. “The races of Reindeer men were in undisturbed
possession of western Europe for a period of at least ten times as long as the
interval between ourselves and the beginning of the Christian era.” (H. G. Wells.)
If we add these periods of time together we may form some estimate of the age
of a civilisation such as the climatic conditions have produced and proscribed in
the modern Arctics.
Perhaps it may be said that in one sense the Eskimo have no history. They are
living the same life, under the same rigorous conditions, in the same way now,
as their forefathers lived it before them, [59]and as far back as human life could
be traced in the Arctic earth. It is wonderful how faithfully this oral tradition of
theirs has been handed down through the generations, for the same adventures
and incidents and stories will be told with little or no alteration by various people
of widely different tribes, and events that took place centuries ago will still be
invariably related with circumstantial precision.
The writer well remembers an account given to him one winter’s night by an
aged hunter, of some stores left by a party of the early explorers. It was during a
journey along the south coast of Baffin Land, and shelter had been sought in the
snow house of an ancient Eskimo couple. The old man was grandfather of the
tribe, and had been a noted hunter in his day, and had fought many a battle with
the savage elements and more savage beasts of the wild. It was after the
evening meal. The old fellow and his equally old wife had been warmed with
some steaming coffee liberally sweetened with molasses, and regaled with
ship’s biscuit. The pipes of both had been filled, and were drawing well. Their
bronzed, lined faces, lined like the shell of a walnut, shone with contentment,
they huddled on their sleeping bench and smoked and dreamed of the
strenuous past. A question or two soon elicited a flood of guttural reminiscences.
The old hunter pictured himself as a youth again, and went over the exploits of
his prime, prompted now and again by the crone at his side, in a shrewd
expectation of further acceptable items. Among other [60]things, he told of the
various “dumps” or “caches” of stores made by the white men who came long
ago, remembering exactly the localities and the contents of every one. Some
had been broken into long since by wandering Eskimo; some had been
destroyed by bears; some remained intact. His memory was as exact and
reliable as if he had seen the things but a week—instead of a lifetime—before.
Perhaps it was an echo, all that time afterwards, of the Franklin tragedy.
These primitive Eskimo inhabit the great archipelago which stretches polewards
from the northern shores of the Canadian continent, from Greenland on the east
to Alaska and the Aleutian islands on the extreme west. There is, too, a
settlement of Eskimo beyond Behring Strait. Some ethnographers hold them to
be of purely American origin with no affinities in Asia, however Mongolian they
may be in appearance. Dr. Rink believes in an Alaskan origin for the Eskimo, as
opposed to an Asian, but another authority, Dr. Boas, thinks the solution of this
racial problem might be obtained by means of an archæological research on the
coast of the Behring Sea.
The original Eskimo stock is now probably extinct. In language and physique,
many of the present day tribes exhibit traits of racial admixture with the Red
Indians. This has occurred in such junction areas as Labrador and Alaska, and
has given rise to the probably quite fallacious idea of an Indian origin for the
Arctic race. This error could not be made in [61]Eskimo lands proper. Those who
have lived for long years with both Indian and Eskimo, and are intimately
acquainted with the language, legends, and characteristics of both peoples, hold
strongly to the opinion that they are entirely distinct. Personally, the writer would
incline to the belief that the Innooeet are of Mongolian stock. He has heard on
good authority of a pure Eskimo sailor being addressed by a Chinaman in
Chinese, under the impression that he was speaking to a fellow-countryman. It is
conjectured that in the remote past some Mongols may have reached the sea
coast in the extreme east, and have crossed by boat from island to island, and
so to the Arctics of North America. Increasing there in numbers, they presently
dispossessed the aboriginals—the “Tooneet”—and drove them to the “back of
the Arctic beyond.” But of this more when we come to Eskimo legends.
Undoubtedly the Eskimo are linked, if not by blood certainly by custom, to the
Arctic peoples of Siberia, to the Lapps and Finns of northern Europe. In historic
times they mixed with the Danes and Norsemen. They are not numerically very
strong. Forty thousand may possibly total the nation, and of those 12,000 are in
Greenland, and rather more in Alaska, leaving some 13,000 souls scattered
along the shores of Baffin Land, Melville Peninsula, Boothia, Victoria Island,
Banks Island and the rest of the bleak, fragmented continent. It is in Baffin Land,
in Boothia, and Victoria that the pure Eskimo race is found. [62]Elsewhere the
type is extremely mixed. It is to be deplored, too, that where the people have
been in contact with vicious and unscrupulous whites, traders, sailors, and the
rest, the introduction not only of alien blood but of the diseases of “civilisation”
have here and there threatened extinction to whole tribes.
The “Central” tribes of Eskimo (i.e., those tribes exclusive of the Greenlanders,
the Alaskans, and all the Labradorians save those on the northern shore of
Hudson’s Strait) number about thirty-two. They have been carefully classified,
enumerated, and geographically located, by the ethnologist, Dr. Boas. Three
communities are found along the northern shore of Hudson’s Strait (the southern
shore of Baffin Land), the Sikkoswelangmeoot at King Cape, the Akuliangmeoot
at North Bluff, and the Quamanangmeoot in the Middle Savage Islands. All
along the coast of Davis’ Strait are scattered another nine tribes, the chief of
which are the Nuvungmeoot, in the neighbourhood of Frobisher Bay, and the
Oqomiut (divided into four territorial groups) all about Cumberland Sound. The
Lake Netselings Eskimo are a branch of these, called the Talikpingmeoot. In the
extreme north of Baffin Land the Tunungmeoot are found at Eclipse Sound, and
the Tununirusirmeoot about Admiralty Inlet.
There is constant intercourse and intermarriage among these scattered groups

(none of which is numerically large), wherever the tracts of land in between them
are not wholly impassable. Other groups [63]are more or less isolated by long
stretches of territory, unnegotiable by any means of Eskimo travel. These folk
are not only migratory in their habits, but great travellers for the sake of
travelling, as well. They often engage on journeys which occupy months or even
years, although there is a strong tendency among the old people to return to
their native spot before the end, and so territorial distinctions are maintained.
Even before the advent of Europeans and the trade they brought with them,
there was a certain amount of barter going on among the Arctic folk themselves,
occasioning not a little movement. More driftwood being found in some localities
than in others (chiefly at a place called Tudjadjuak), the tribes came from
everywhere to barter for it with those on the spot. Again, the soapstone or
“potstone,” of which their lamps and cooking utensils were made, is found in a
few places only, such as at Kautag, Kikkerton and Quarmaqdjuin; so that the
natives came long distances to dig or trade for that, too. Pyrites for striking fire
was also a valuable if local production, and flint for arrow head making. On the
whole the relationships of the various tribes were very friendly, and open
hospitality was everywhere observed throughout all the regions where
communication was fairly open and established. Some feuds or tribal reserves
obtained where the peoples were strange to each other, and hence arose some
extraordinary customs as to greetings, which looked very much like
[64]challenges to single combat by the chosen representatives of either group.
There seems to be some evidence that the present day Eskimo were not the
original inhabitants of these regions at all. There are definite traces still
remaining of an earlier folk called the Tooneet. Eskimo tradition speaks

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Documentary Film Festivals, Vol.

Documentary Film Festivals: Changes, Challenges,

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Methods, History, Politics

More information about this series at

Framing Film Festivals

Cover illustration: Cro Magnon / Alamy Stock Photo

in the festival circuit that affect documentary production, distribution,

A Researcher Navigating a Growing Festival Circuit

of creative documentary and the extension to feature-length productions

Documentary Film Festival, I had to keep my balance on the back of a

A Curator Researching Film Festivals as Sites

Festival (Hot Docs) and imagineNATIVE in Toronto, Docudays UA

Leioa, Spain Aida Vallejo

This project, which has culminated in a two-volume collection of chapters

Introduction—Volume 1: Documentary Film Festivals:

Defining Documentary in the Festival Circuit: A Conversation

Part I Research and Methods 29

Introduction to Part I, Vol. 1: Researching Documentary Film

Film Festival Research Workshops: Debates on Methodology 41

The Data-Driven Festival: Recordkeeping and Archival

Part II Histories and Origins 61

Introduction to Part II, Vol. 1: Mapping the History of

The Rise of Documentary Festivals: A Historical Approach 77

The Film Festival as a Vehicle for Memory Officialization:

Forging a Cultural Elite: Nyon and the Age of Festival

Finding a Position on the Global Map of Film Festivals:

Part III Politics and Policies 165

Introduction to Part III, Vol. 1: Politics and Policies167

The Film Festival of Independent and Underground:

Mainstreaming Documentary and Activism at Toronto’s Hot

The Development of Documentary Film Festivals in India:

Found in Translation: Film Festivals, Documentary and the

Amanda Alencar is an assistant professor in the Department of Media &

cialized in avant-garde, documentary, silent film and cinema in minority

animations based on the Finnish original Moomin concept, con-

The Rise of Documentary Festivals: A Historical Approach

The Film Festival as a Vehicle for Memory Officialization:

Forging a Cultural Elite: Nyon and the Age of Festival

Finding a Position on the Global Map of Film Festivals:

The Film Festival of Independent and Underground:

Mainstreaming Documentary and Activism at Toronto’s

The Development of Documentary Film Festivals in India:

Found in Translation: Film Festivals, Documentary

Introduction to Part II, Vol. 1: Mapping the History of

Aida Vallejo and Ezra Winton

Documentary cinema has experienced growing cultural visibility, commer-

© The Author(s) 2020 1

lenge) the canon, focused academic studies on documentary festivals are

Bringing Together Film Festival and Documentary

dynamics of film circulation, theoreticians who seek to redress the colonial

well as the dependent relationships that journalists and critics establish

Leioa, Spain Aida Vallejo

Part I Research and Methods 29

Film Festival Research Workshops: Debates on Methodology 41

Part II Histories and Origins 61

The Rise of Documentary Festivals: A Historical Approach 77

Part III Politics and Policies 165

Introduction to Part III, Vol. 1: Politics and Policies167

c ontribute not only to an expansion of the documentary canon but also to