“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell
Ever since the audience ran away from a long-departed train projected for the first time on a screen by the Lumière brothers, the passage of time has been one of the film’s fundamental issues. The presence of the camera captures and preserves something that is always, by necessity, already past. On the other hand, projection on a screen brings the past back into the present. Behind their respective machines, the director, the camera operator, and the editor can shape and distort the representation of the past and the audience’s experience of the present.
The films proposed by fARAD this year are, each in its own way, meditations on the documentary as a time machine, as a play on presence and evanescence, as a means for constructing parallel realities in the present and re-assessing a partially accessed past.
fARAD Lab
Among the novelties of the third edition is the launching of fARAD Laboratory, a unique creative laboratory destined to young documentary film professionals, to be developed throughout the Festival.
Participants are selected by the fARAD festival board and lab mentors, and will be offered not only technical and creative advice, but also a network of continuing support and mentorship from the highest level of documentary filmmaking in Romana and internationally. Participants in the first edition of fARAD Lab included: Andrei Răuțu and Flavia Barabas with Fereastra lui Mircea Eliade; Gabriela Forfotă and Carmen Tofeni, with Folk!; Daria Nistor and Marius Mihalcea with La Belle Epoque; Andra Tarara and Maria Salomia with Portret de familie cu bunică. Advisers included: Magnus Gertten (film director, Sweden), Alexandru Belc (film director, Romania), Titus Muntean (film director, Romania), Vlad Petri (film director, Romania), as well as Dana Bunescu (editor, Romania), and the creative team of the festival including artistic director Mona Nicoară (film director, Romania) and president Mihai Chirilov (film critic, Romania).
