Patrick Hazard: Director of the London International Documentary Festival "A Conversation in Film" and the forthcoming 'Conversation in Europe - Torino'

The First London International Documentary Festival took place at the British Museum on 17 March 2007. In association with the London Review of Books and with the support of the French, Goethe and Polish Cultural Institutes, Channel 4's Fourdocs, and the American Museum of Natural History's Margaret Mead Film and Video festival, New York. 22 films were screened in three cinemas on a single day. An ENCORE! season of a selection of the documentary films is currently underway www.lidf.co.uk. For 2008 a bigger festival is planned over 6 days in different locations around London, including the British Museum.

A development of the Festival for February 2008 will be "A Conversation in Europe" - Turin. This new, annual, event will be dedicated to European documentary film and will also support the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. With its creation a festival network will be created between London, New York and Turin.

The Festival and a whole range of other documentary related ideas are presented by PocketVisions which is an independent exhibitor of documentary film. They hold regular screenings and debates in London and provide access to academic and expert advice for filmmakers.

PocketVisions believes the films it screens are but a first step, and it brings its diverse audiences together to take part in what it calls 'conversations in film'.

The name 'PocketVisions' was inspired by some lines written by the critic and author John Berger: "The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement."

Patrick Hazard is the Director of PocketVisions and of LIDF. He trained as an anthropologist at University College London and has carried out research in Turin on migration, political radicalism and theories of place. Here he talks to Caroline Boyle.

What was the inspiration behind LIDF and why 2007?

The inspiration and the timing involved, like so many things, a fairly healthy dose of serendipity.

The initial spur was quite simple, a recognition that film, and especially documentary film was being used ever more frequently within research and teaching contexts and that documentary film was also becoming for many people a primary source of information. This being so, we felt that perhaps it might be interesting to bring people together - academics, filmmakers, policy makers etc. to discuss the impact, the reception of this sort of material and see how those using the medium might benefit from each other's expertise.

This idea of a coming together, of a critical space, proved so popular that a momentum was developed, and eventually the right people merged with the ideas and the LIDF was born.

However, behind this seemingly pragmatic development there do lie certain preoccupations that are raised frequently at our screenings, and represent a series of more focused questions that it is hoped the bigger space of the LIDF can explore more fully. Many of these revolve around concerns with ethics, responsibility, and the 'truthfulness' of non-fiction work. There is an awareness of how these representations, these artful constructs of the 'real' can align themselves with progressive or regressive views.

Documentary is being used in wider and wider political contexts to spread ideas, examine situations from various angles, reflect on policy and its outcomes and encourage forms of involvement and activism at the local and other levels.

New technology is allowing many more viewpoints and more people to be involved in this process. Visual imagery and silence can say things very differently, often more eloquently, than words can. They evoke different responses which can then be compared and discussed through conversation.

There is a huge amount of documentary material out there and in the Festival we want to give a platform to more of these film-makers than might otherwise have their work screened. Whereas it is easier and cheaper nowadays to make films, it remains difficult to have them shown or distributed commercially. We also want to discuss the film. What did people feel, what did they think? There are always so many questions left hanging, so what sort of environment can we create that allows the life of those questions to last beyond 'lights up' and to find some sort of response? At the very least this moment of conversation and contact counteracts the sensation that there is nothing anyone can do about anything. By giving our audiences the opportunity to talk to the film-maker and others affected by the subject matter, or implicated in it and question them, we hope to encourage rounded debate

Contrary to how it might often appear if one watches a studio discussion on TV, the answers to certain questions are not always to be found in a choice between one pre-established position or another. If one rejects the black and white extremes of political discourse, it becomes obvious that whatever is neither for nor against also needs to be articulated. The lack of this sort of space may be why so many people are turned off by politics. It doesn't seem to reflect lived experience at all. The fact that documentary film can fill this space may account in part for its increasing popularity.

To give you an example: last night I went to see a film about the use of a small park in north London. It was the culmination of four years of observation by the film-maker about who uses the park and how. It was a film which very slowly revealed its subject matter. It provided a different tempo. The local MP and Councillors were in the audience, as well as people from the neighbourhood Everyone there agreed that the use of the documentary had helped them see things they had never noticed before and allowed them to escape that feeling that, they couldn't participate, create, and be heard. The idea is now being floated, generated by the local community itself, for a second film. Behind this is the realisation that, carefully handled, a film can show something beyond cartoon-like simplicity.

The LIDF makes me feel quite inspired and in awe of all the wonderful work that is going on, all the questions being raised. The festival is very much just an extension of this activity, a response to it, and we will try to do our best to provide a suitable platform.

What did you notice about the entries for the First Festival? Did you detect certain trends in subject matter and approach?

We did not impose any specific themes on the entrants. The sample did not reveal a particular cultural zeitgeist though many films did focus on life on the edge, on the marginalised in society where there are serious political issues to grapple with. I suppose in a sense we noticed what we were looking for, an approach like the one I have just outlined. And we found it. The subject matter varied greatly but the approach of patient commitment directed to real issues in the real world was the main characteristic. The films provide a cultural place in which things happen. The best submissions we felt all made us look more carefully and through some kind of analysis moved us from an initial confusion towards some form of clarity. We had entries this year from the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Romania, Turkey, the US and Latin America.

Looking at one particular film from this year's Festival "A different story" (un'altra storia) and which you have just screened again in the ENCORE! series what do you think it has to say about the state of politics and political engagement today?

This was a very special film made in Italy in 2006 which followed the campaign of Rita Borsellino for the Governorship of Sicily. She became politically active after the murder of her brother the judge Paolo Borsellino by the mafia in 1992. Although in the end she did not win the election which was won by the incumbent Salvatore Cuffaro, a Christian Democrat on trial for complicity with the Mafia, she did cut his majority from more than 20 per cent to about 9 per cent. Mr Cuffaro won 52.2 per cent of the vote, against 43 per cent for Ms Borsellino. This film pursued the campaigns of two controversial candidates as they prepare to do battle: portraying a clash between two candidates, but also a human conflict, opposing views on power, legality and, more significantly, the condition of modern day Sicily itself. The film showed the way in which Rita tried to refresh politics in one of the most difficult of situations. What she did transcends borders and is one possible template for participatory politics with a vitality which took in the whole complexity of the situation and began to cut through it and through the stale and empty political jargon of the uneasy status quo. "Un'altra storia ... e possibile." This sort of film provides such a great way of comparing political situations across the Continent and opening us to different points of view.

The response to the film was very interesting, and was as uplifting as was the film itself. In the discussion afterwards, both at the LIDF and the second screening at the Roxy, the emphasis was not on the Mafia, it was hardly mentioned, instead, the questions and comments revealed surprise at the vitality and optimism contained within this campaign, a campaign that also involved so many young people. Rita's campaign, in particular its lack of cant, its refreshing directness of expression, and the way it exposed the narrow self-interest of the party system, definitely touched a cord here, but it also revealed a very different political culture. This response was not simply surprise at the shock of the new, a novelty, there was genuine interest in how this different language and attitude was practical as well as symbolic. How it connected with various social movements across Europe, that History is open-ended, and that we create it in unexpected ways.

Has the film had general release or will it be screened on British television?

The film has been screened twice in the UK. At the LIDF and again by us at the LIDF Encore. I am not aware of any other screenings outside Italy. Within Italy it has had limited distribution, and been screened at numerous festivals. It won the Special Jury Prize at the Torino Film Festival last year. It is also available now on DVD from Playmaker Produzione.

You mentioned the often stale and jargon ridden language of much of our politics today. Do you think this is one of the reasons people seem to be so turned off politics?

Ok, this is a big question and I will try to answer it carefully. I'm a little wary of speaking in broad terms, but at the same time I think it is fair to talk of disillusionment. But where does this come from and more importantly what can we do about it? The two questions are obviously linked.

Yes, I do think that the language of politics is jargon-ridden and that is dispiriting in a profound as well as more immediate sense. The language is overly managerial and full of business jargon, debate is too polarised and stage-managed to provide immediate conflict, false choices. Of course, cause and effect here is a little troubling we must wonder at how much this constant sense of polarisation and aggression is not also the cause of the very problems being discussed.

It is all about language and discourse, about the difference between a conversation and the sound of one hand clapping.

From our point of view we find a desire for conversation, the mutual exchange of ideas without a single author, a situation that responds to what Levinas called the 'free stranger in all of us'. And if this sounds vague, it isn't. Compare this to a language that merely serves the ends and needs of the user - that is what we mean by jargon, and jargon is always exclusive not inclusive. It is not generous, but miserly. The language of politics, of the mediocracy, feels like a private language, and quite rightly we distrust it.

But here we return to documentary if you like. The increasing cross-over between fiction and non-fiction in politics, is mirrored in the blurring of the lines between non-fiction and fiction in the arts. However, I am not sure that this is simply a continuum from truthfulness to ever greater degrees of unreality. Because, it would seem that so-called 'realty TV' is not only the most unreal of situations, but of a different order entirely from the sort of documentary films we screen. It is if you like an extreme form of subjectivism.

If there is a political question here it is simply that this engagement we see in so many of these films, is really a question: what am I seeing? How do I respond? Do I believe? In a way documentary films open up holes in experience that have to be filled - and here language comes back in.

In the use of documentary film we see an emphasis on the practical and the personal and how this relates to wider concerns. These stories need not be of minimal interest, stories of the small, the inconsequential, rather than the great, the good, the powerful. In fact the emotional rawness, the reminder that we share a common space, common concerns, that we are united by far more than pulls us apart, the reminder that we are joined by experience and not rhetoric or the abstract truth of statements, surely this is something we can't have enough of?

Details for submissions the 2008 LIDF Festival, entry forms etc. can be found at www.lidf.co.uk

Una conversazione in Europa - Torino will take place in Turin in early February 2008 - further details will be posted on the LIDF website