By Richard Shpuntoff
Argentina’s first International Festival of Documentary Cinema and Arts (FIDBA), Buenos Aires International Documentary Film Festival, held its awards and closing ceremony last night.
Everardo González's Cuates de Australia / Drought from Mexico was awarded the prize for Best Ibero-American Documentary, while Alejo Hoijman’s The Shark's Eye / El ojo del Tiburón (pictured) and Tatiana Font's Mi reino no es de este mundo, won first place and an honorable mention, respectively, in the Argentine competition. The Portuguese film What Now? Remind Me / É Agora? Lembra-me by Joaquim Pinto which took the grand prize in the international competition.
The festival – Argentina’s first competitive international festival dedicated solely to documentary – aims to open the field of documentary creation and production beyond older, “traditional” idea of documentary practice in the region. Founded by the directors of the Buenos Aires branch of the Observatorio Documentary Film School (founded in Barcelona), the festival ran an eight day campus parallel to the competition and other screenings.
The campus consisted of a series of in-depth seminars on a range of approaches to documentary material including: WebDocs by Jorge Caballero, Interactive Documentary by Christopher Allen and Andre Valentim Almedia of Union Docs, and a Live Cinema lesson by José Luis Martin Galindo and José Inerzia, who presented Antropotrip: Sinfonía Urbana en Directo, a live documentary around the subject of Tijuana, México and the U.S. border.
