Documenta Madrid Festival Lineup Announced

The 10^th Edition of the International Festival of Documentary Cinema DOCUMENTA MADRID shall open next 5^th of May, 2013. The contest shall have an Official Selection with 15 films, fourteen within the competitive section and a last film, out of contest, which shall be screened at the closing ceremony. All the films of the competitive section will be screened at CINETECA.

This year´s Official Selection puts a special emphasis on the excellence of its productions, all of them absolute premieres in Spain and which will be attended by their directors.

As a starting event, opening the competitive section, we shall screen “The Gatekeepers”, the controversial documentary film which was nominated to the Oscar Awards this year, featuring the Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic secret service agency. The film shows for the first time the inside operations of the agency, through the testimonies of six of its former directors. To introduce the film, the festival will host its director Dror Moreh.

With a completely different perspective and also in the competitive section, “Winters Nomads” is a beautifully filmed documentary which tells the everyday life of the last Swiss shepherds. The tape has won, amongst many others, the 2012 Best Documentary Film European Award. Its director, Manuel Von Struler, shall attend the Spanish capital city to present and talk about his film with the audience of CINETECA.

“The Act of Killing” is the documentary film winner of the Panorama Berlin 2013, and of the First Prize at the CPH 2012 (Copenhagen´s Documentary Cinema Festival) and shall be another of the competitive section selection. The film was directed by Joshua Oppenheimer together with Christine Cynn and an anonymous co-director, and tells the story of the atrocities committed by the sinister paramilitary groups in Indonesia during the 1960s, which ended up with the extermination of more than a million people. The film´s originality is that the story is told by the assassins themselves, who appear in it as if they were cinema starlets.

To round up the festival, the 2001 Oscar winner Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, will present out of the competitive section his last work: “The Staircase 2. The Last Chance”. The film is the follow-up of the enthralling documentary series THE STAIRCASE which feature the trial of the writer Michael Peterson, charged with killing his wife, a case which was never solved. This new documentary film gives a turn to the story, reconsidering the basis of the approved sentence.