Please welcome the main programme of the 19th Docudays UA — Brand New World! Darya Averchenko, the head of the Communications Department and a member of the Festival's Selection Committee tells more about the programme.
It is no coincidence that the name of this year's main film programme echoes with the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. As the author of dystopia, we were looking for an answer to the question of what our world will be like tomorrow. We are talking not only about the robotization of professions, overcoming the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, balancing on the verge of an environmental catastrophe, but also about the ideas of authoritarianism that are taking root even in the most democratic states.
The programme includes three films: All Light, Everywhere, Waste No.6 How Great and Fashion Babylon.
All Light, Everywhere is a film by an American director Theo Anthony. The author explores how people see the world, focusing on the use of police body cameras and other forms of police surveillance. The director combines these with solar eclipse tracking, while simultaneously discussing the development of automatic weapons and a film camera. We visit the facilities of the Axon enterprise and discover an infinite number of equipment that observes the world of people day and night. After all, according to the police, every person, at least once in their life, has committed a crime. And if it has not been committed yet, it will definitely be done in the future. The film became a real sensation and won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Nonfiction Experimentation at the Sundance Film Festival last year.
In the film Waste No.6 How Great Finnish director Jan Ijäs talks about the paradoxes of the new digital world. In South Korea, the total dependence of teenagers on gadgets has led to the emergence of a state rehabilitation programme and the creation of special camps. Smartphones are taken away from children to help them to go through "dope sick" symptoms similar to drug addiction. They have to experience the tsunami in a special room, they are washed away by a simulated wave, so they have to hold the iron railing tight. When you watch the film, you will find out what other exercises bring characters back to physical reality. It is interesting that in the next novel we visit the largest garbage dump of electronic equipment in Ghana, where locals extract precious metals from gadgets. If only addicted teenagers from a special camp could see how black poisonous smog rises over the city, the place where broken smartphones turned into ashes!
The film Fashion Babylon by Gianluca Matarrese at first glance seems like a fun observation of the world of the fashion industry. However, Fashion Week ends, and the drag queens and drag kings who were sitting in the front row, putting on a show and being the centre of attention, are trying to make it to the next year. Survival, humiliation, rejection of otherness. This film is about the reverse side of the brilliant world of high fashion, where nothing is happening the way it is shown in the illustrations of fashion magazines.
You will be able to watch films from the programme in cinemas and on docuspace.org.
Stills from All Light, Everywhere, Waste No.6 How Great and Fashion Babylon.
