German documentary filmmaker Gereon Wetzel had his camera trained on the action. When Andresin, Zoraida's trainer and, presumably, her psychological coach, refused to force her up, he left the team and walked off. More crucial for Wetzel, it meant that one of the main characters in his film had disappeared from the screen and would not be seen by audiences again.
This, said Wetzel, whose "Castells" opened the 2006 Taiwan International Documentary Festival Oct. 27, was fairly typical of nonfiction filmmaking. "You can never plan the plot. Very likely you will come across the situation that the protagonists are lost in the middle of the film, and you need to find the solution." It is at such moments that people in his profession might be tempted to bend the rules to maintain a coherent narrative. This, he said, made the editing process even more important when making a documentary than when making a feature movie.
Moreover, Wetzel concluded, "documentary can never be the truth. We are imagining the reality, and the film only shows one point of view: our perspectives."
This, of course flies in the face of common impressions and expectations of documentaries. A woman surnamed Su who, with her three sons, was in the audience at the 2006 TIDF opening event at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, said she liked documentaries because "they are authentic and real, and do not rely on rehearsals." Another woman, Su Li-hua, who had happened to passing through the museum's park on her evening walk, agreed, adding "besides, documentaries have the benefit of being educational."
Reservations about the limitations on "realism" in documentary making were raised, however, by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke whose "Dong"--meaning East--was shown Oct. 28 at the festival. "When I made 'Dong,' I captured many people's natural ways of life," Jai said. "Yet, everyone has an awareness of self-protection for reasons of privacy and life's hardships that he tries to hide in front of the camera."
In fact, after releasing his documentary, which covers a visit by oil painter Liu Xiaodong--another reference of the title--to the rapidly disappearing area of the Three Gorges in southwest China and the lives of ordinary people there, Jia felt a certain frustration at the limitations of documentary and went on to make a feature movie on the same subject. Titled "Still Life," it went on to win the Golden Lion for best film at the 63rd Venice Film Festival.
Jia said that, even though some directors might follow their protagonists for five to 10 years, intervention by the camera could still distort the film or change the plot development. He gave the example of an actress in "Dong" who, knowing he would probably prefer filming in a crowded railway station, took the slower train home to her flooded hometown rather than flying.
While admitting that "documentaries present a sense of reality, not reality itself" and that "directors can only pursue a feeling of realism, since how one feels about reality may be absurd to others," Jia added optimistically that "it is not a bad thing to learn about the limitations of documentary."
On a separate topic, Jia said that, having participated in numerous film festivals around the world, he particularly enjoyed the outdoor public screenings in Taichung. "Documentary needs to cultivate its audience to become more actively involved," he said. "It might be related to Taiwan's weather, which is more suitable for outdoor activities, but in Beijing we do not have screenings outside. People have to watch documentaries in private."
To encourage a wider section of society to become interested in documentaries, 2006 TIDF offered one film free each evening on an outdoor screen erected beside the NMFA. The rest, as well as a variety of symposia and workshops, were shown at three locations throughout the city.
Furthermore, to stimulate debate among the people of Taichung and central Taiwan, festival coordinator Hsiao Chu-chen invited 10 Taiwanese filmmakers to make short documentaries about the area. Collated into a single piece titled "Doc Taichung," this was also screened at the opening ceremony.
Other longer Taiwanese contributions included "Fishermen in the City" about a century-old fishing community being squeezed by urban development, "The Pigeon Game" about Taiwan's 30,000 dedicated pigeon fanciers, "Scars on Memory" about a homosexual policeman who finds true love at a spa but then dies of cancer, "Joyful Life" and "Forgotten Corner," two films about the campaign to save the Lo-Sheng Leprosarium near Taipei, and, winner of the TIDF Taiwan Award, "Yellow Box" about bikini-clad girls selling betel nuts beside the island's roads.
2006 TIDF's 129 films were shown under various headings. These included the "International Competition"--won by Spanish filmmaker Adan Aliaga for "My Grandmother's House" about the relationship between a 75-year-old and her 6-year-old granddaughter--"Watching Southeast Asia," "Experimental Documentary Shorts," "Generation neXt" and, for those with an interest in the history of documentary filmmaking, "American Documentary 1920s-Now," selected and presented by New York's Museum of Modern Art.
This last category covered U.S. documentary filmmaking beginning with what is generally acknowledged as the first feature-length documentary made, "Nanook of the North" (1922). It was followed by "Four More Years" (1972), which covered the Republican Party's national convention and was described by MOMA as making film history by providing an alternative view of media coverage of the U.S. political process, and other films including "Atomic Ed & The Black Hole" (2000) about the self-appointed curator of an unofficial museum of the nuclear age.
Filmmakers like Wetzel and Jia concerned with the question of documentaries' objectivity and their relationship with reality would have enjoyed the irony of showing "Nanook." While this film represented a major breakthrough in its day, with depictions of the struggles of an Inuit named Nanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic, nowadays it is also regarded as having blurred the lines between documentary and feature movie in a way that is no longer acceptable. Filmmaker Robert Flaherty used idealized people to construct a stage family of Nanook, his wife and children, built a special roofless three-sided igloo to film interior shots, persuaded hunters to use the harpoons of their ancestors rather than their customary guns, and enacted a life-and-death search for shelter just a short distance from two centers of habitation.
For Sally Berger who presented the MOMA selection, "Nanook" nevertheless represents an important departure point for the whole genre. Similarly, although all the films told American stories, she felt they were representative of how documentaries had changed stylistically from the 1920s to the present. Flaherty's film, for example, was based on dramatic technique because he was highly influenced by what was happening in Hollywood to the new medium of filmmaking, she said.
This echoed with another comment from Jia, who observed that "while documentary can be didactic, ultimately it is a film, a history, not a social report or research paper."
Meanwhile, the TIDF jury appreciated Jia's own take on documentary storytelling: his "Dong" was awarded the Grand Prize in the "Asian Vision Competition." Although Wetzel's "Castells" was not so fortunate, at least his female protagonist, exaneta Zoraida, and the rest of her Youth Squad, did go on to win the Catelonian human tower competition, even without its coach Andresin.