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Doc Noir Kicks Off |
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| 07/12/2009 |
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The documentary competition, Doc Noir, unfolds alongside the official selection. Organized by Luciano Barisone and Carlo Chatrian, and judged by young European critics and the students of DAMS in Turin, there are five titles vying for the Mystery Prize: Welcome to Tijuana, Mobsters Without Borders, Entre Ours et Loup, Killer Poet and Playing Columbine.
Of the various common elements that can be seen across our many sections, we would like to point out one in particular: that which unites Agnès Gattegno’s documentary Mobsters Without Borders and the “Spazio Italia” title Una Vita Tranquilla by Claudio Cupellini. Both tackle the “n’drangheta” (Calabrese mafia) – the former in a documentary, the latter was inspired by the events – behind the Duisburg massacre of August 15, 2007, in which six Italians were killed.
The following is the catalogue introduction to the Doc Noir section organized by Luciano Barisone and Carlo Chatrian: Looking Out, Looking Within.
In countless noir films, the (public or private) investigator and the photo-reporter flank one another – and in many cases coincide – in the obvious goal to capture suspects through the image/evidence. The testimonial value of still or moving images is on those occasions a turning point in an investigation, and solves the search for the culprit with something tangible.
Today, that same mechanism can be found in documentaries that by uniting civil goals and artistic ambition tell life stories in the attempt to analyze social phenomena in which crime and politics are intricately interwoven, the innocent are not always cleared and there’s rarely a “happy ending.” While fictional cases are often solved, this hardly ever happens in documentaries. Their task is not to supply reassuring certainties that justice will be carried out against those who commit crimes so much as to make viewers reflect upon a contemporary phenomenon of the world in which they live, and create the premise for the formation of a public opinion and a civil conscience. Thus, they are more than just stories of “crime and punishment,” and become analytical portraits of a society and its contradictions. And is exactly what we witness in the five films of the DocNoir section of this year’s Noir in Festival, which depict complex phenomena that span from America to Europe.
The overall image is of global strife and a rampant criminality that touches all aspects of society: from the total control of border regions by Mexican drug traffickers (Yorgos Avgeropoulos’ Welcome to Tijuana); to drug running in Europe, carried out with ruthless efficiency by the Calabrese n’drangheta (Agnès Gattegno’s Mobsters Without Borders); to the constant and violent limitations of freedom of thought and speech in Russia, especially when it comes to its war with Chechnya (Denis Sneguirev’s Entre Ours et Loup); and to the contradictions of the very social and civil fabric of the United States, where an escaped murderer can be a critically acclaimed poet (Susan Gray’s Killer Poet) and a horrible massacre becomes a virtual game that can be downloaded for free (Danny Ledonne’s Playing Columbine).
Naturally, none of these films want to (or can) solve the cases they depict. Audiences study and analyze them in the attempt and hope of prodding the inert attention of a public often numbed by what the mass media feeds it and indifferently convinced that “cases like this one have always and will always take place.” Documentaries challenge this laziness of conscience in the conviction that even just one spectator of those films can contribute to the birth of a common, shared ethic. While TV detectives save cases and offer reassurance, in noir documentaries the urgency of the unsolved problems leaves the senses on the alert, forcing us to look out, to look within. |
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