DOCUMENTING THE DOCUMENTERS

9:30am
-11:00am

There is a rich tradition in narrative cinema of laying bare the mechanisms of filmmaking itself, from Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ to Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain. Yet, reflexivity looks a bit different in investigative cinema. A number of new, masterful documentaries have pulled the cover off the investigative process, while being great works of journalistic investigation unto themselves.

Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh’s debut feature, Writing With Fire, for one, follows a group of Dalit women who start a newspaper in Uttar Pradesh, and become India’s first and only women-run newspaper. Their film not only documents the investigative process, but elicits important questions about the relationship between filmmaker and film subject, particularly when both are accustomed to being in the position of crafting the story, not the inspirations for it. Such films tell us about the mechanisms of filmmaking and journalism, as well as the delicate balance between author and protagonist.

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