New UK Festival Celebrates Documentary Film-Making
BritDoc 2006 26th-28th July Keble College, Oxford
A portrait of the Iraq war made by soldiers on the frontline, life in a former concentration camp, the ludicrous attempts to assassinate the president of Cuba and an unflinching chronicle of a year of suicides from San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge - these are among the 20 feature-length documentary films competing in the inaugural Britdoc festival, which starts today at Keble College, Oxford.
Organisers hope to capitalise on the rising profile of documentary film-making - especially with the recent international success of American and European documentaries ranging from Fahrenheit 9/11 to Être et Avoir and Capturing the Friedmans to Super Size Me - and give a fillip to British documentary film-making.
Director Mike Figgis, who will be participating in a panel discussion on the relationship between documentary and fiction film-making, said: "As we become overly familiar with the tricks of mainstream cinema, more and more people are turning to documentary with the realisation that truth is definitely more interesting than fiction."
Full report in The Guardian