Why dedicate Dockanema to the revival of memories?
by Pedro Pimenta
We challenge the audiences who attend this Third Maputo Documentary Film Festival to discover the significance and the role of memory, either obvious or veiled, in each film.
Part of the nature of the classic documentary film is to aid individual memories and to make a special contribution to collective memory, which is the stuff of history. Against this background, influenced and even pressured by the various initiatives about memory that are happening all around us here and now, Dockanema is likewise dedicated to memory.
We live in a time when the ephemeral is favoured over the timeless; the superficial is given preference over the profound. Levity and flippancy are cultivated in our customs, social relations or in intellectual activity. This trend envelops us in day-to-day life, in the media, in all its forms and guises, and characterises our interaction with others. What is being developed are standardised and homogenous people who plunge ahead and never stop to look behind, just like an army of “robots”. However, our own instincts impel us to resist this trend, which will annihilate the very essence of human beings.
We cannot live without individual and collective points of reference. We regularly miss them and we find ourselves overcome by an impulse to glance through our books from childhood, to rummage among the old photos tossed in a box and never mounted in albums or to visit the secret places of our teenage years. This is what the documentaries that we have chosen do.
And so, this time we have selected films from the perspective of understanding more about the relationship between memory and the documentary; not just from a technical point of view, but also with very specific and useful content. This is not an original or isolated effort on our part. We are surrounded by a growing number of initiatives that take us back into history; it is a national concern to recover our collective memory. This is the case with the lives of the heroes of the independence struggle, where we need to do more than simply name a street in the city after them; it is also the case with the writer who has just dedicated a book to reflection on the experience of the re-education camps in our recent history.
And even closer to us, there is the initiative of the National Audiovisual and Cinema Institute, which is at long last dealing with recovering the bank of cinematographic images, which until very recently was in danger or crumbling to dust once and for all.
We can say that once more this Third Festival is honouring Mozambican documentary films, bringing back the unforgettable Kuxa Kanema and other titles still remembered by so many Mozambicans who were young in the 70s; we offer our contribution to the preservation of our image as a nation, to the recovery of our points of reference in the past, which teach us that what we built with our own hands is still there, at the disposal of future generations.
Last but not least, this third edition of Dockanema benefits from the experience of the first two, in terms of management and organisation. This continuous improvement, resulting from the interaction between us and the audience, is also an asset that will serve cinema as we do it in Mozambique.
The Festival Director
Pedro Pimenta