Road Dox

In fiction cinema, road movie usually shows the personal transformation of characters as they make their journey. But in documentary film, they are sometimes just ghosts lost in a political turmoil, like in Álvaro F. Pulpeiro's Venezuela-set So Foul a Sky. Sometimes they are not even able to get on the road, but rather actively search for their identity and a place under the sun while they are stuck in a limbo, like African refugees in Ousmane Samassékou's The Last Shelter. For those with more means, the physical journey is less important than the goal: they follow the money in the form of raw material and its subsequent products between Europe and China, as in Sean Wang's The Marble Travelogue. And there are those who exist outside our idea of what the road is: for Yakutians in the Siberian tundra in Liesbeth De Ceulaer's Holgut, journey is a way of life and for viewers it is a time machine, connecting the prehistoric past and a present that is as distant to us as the titular mammoth.

Vladan Petković, Programme Selector