yearbook 2010/11 - The European Film College

ter the doc. What I have ended up realizing is that the world might seem boring and
dull, and the art of the documentary is not to interpret it, but to find the actual raw and
exciting stories, themes and people, and show the world exiting, scary, thrilling and funny
parts of the actual world we live in. I have come to realize that characters aren’t humans,
but humans are definitely characters. Only through documentaries I’ve managed to be
fully entertained for 1.5 hours by two total originals fighting about the world record in
Donkey Kong, an activist trying to film dolphins, a semi-deluded graffiti-painter with a
handy-cam or simply two poor women living in a remote Portuguese town.
The normally undiscovered power of reality shines through when it’s treated with
patience and the skill to be at the right place at the right time, and at the same time
having the guts to spend several years infiltrating an unseen part of society, a family’s
private life or simply an entire country.
I have through the documentary work at EFC learned to respect the genre more than
anything else in the film media, and for way more reasons than actually necessary. What
I was most afraid to admit in the end is actually that making a documentary takes the
exact same things and skills as a regular feature film, and a bit more than that.
That is just one of the reasons that I ended up taking the course twice, and enjoying
it equally both times.
#19
do i n g w h a t f i C t i o n C a n ’t||fi n a lCu t 2011