On his return from Abu Dhabi, Hani Mustafa reconsiders the narrative-documentary division Documentary film is never as popular as narrative film, but it no doubt commands the attention of the cultural elite. A documentary film is after all an intellectual statement, and since the beginning of documentary filmmaking a good portion of such films have had close ties with political events. The earliest audiovisual records of war, for example �ê" often, admittedly, presented as propaganda �ê" came in the form of the cine journal at a time when television was but a project not yet realised. Cinema in its documentary register documented the details of WWII, and so began an art identical with yet different from the art of film. In its official documentary film competition the fifth Abu Dhabi International Film Festival this year presents a number of important films. The Mexican filmmaker Tatiana Huezo's A Tiniest Place, which received the jury prize, tackles the return home of residents of Cinquera in El Salvador after they evacuated the village following the storming of the village by the army when it was thought to be a base for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The villagers thus emigrated for many years returning only after the end of the civil war (1980-92). The filmmaker, who is originally from El Salvador, manages with remarkable calm, slow-paced interviews with the villagers, to register the tragedy that took place during the war. The interviews consist of reminiscences of life in the village before the war and then during battles. Gradually she manages to draw the viewer in, through the more basic day-to-day issues and onto the more profound �ê" until she starts speaking of the casualties. The director displays marvelous technique in her interviews, separating voice from image so that the interviewees are heard speaking but seen silent. Together with the soundtrack and the moving delivery, this produces a unique and powerful cinematic language. Politics remains the move attractive element for documentary filmmakers. In the 1960s and 1970s, oppositional politics flourished throughout the world, and even the black rights movement, which started in the mid-1950s in the USA, reached its peak in the 1960s with the rise of Martin Luther King, who has become since his assassination in 1968 a symbol not only of the struggle against racism in America but of freedom and justice across the world. It was no doubt the Civil Rights Movement that allured the Swedish director Goran Olsson, whose distinctive The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 is yet another example of documentary cinema at its best. The film is no more than a new edit of footage from this period, yet the director uses it to document the contemporaneous transformation of Afro-American culture. The film opens with an address by Stokely Carmichael, one of the most important black leaders, critiquing King's tolerance �ê" showing that many blacks did not share such an orientation. The film goes on to document the emergence of the radical �ê" armed �ê" black movement, with the Black Panthers' attempt to institute a separate independent government in which Carmichael was honourary prime minister. Attempts to arrest Black Panther leaders like Angela Davies and Eldridge Cleaver lead to FBI director Edgar Hoover announcing that the Black Panthers are the greatest threat to national security. From left-wing politics to drugs: the film shows how that shift occurred at the start of the 1970s, and the way in which it was the authorities' ideal way of dealing with the threat of a black revolution. The film goes on to recount the emergence of the Nation of Islam as a major player, under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad and then Louis Farrakhan, and how the creed of that organisation was presented to black Americans as a way out of the dark tunnel of drugs. It is well known that, at its start, cinema was closer to documentary than narrative, as evidenced by promotions for the Grand Caf�� screening of the earliest motion picture by the Lumiere brothers in Paris in 1895, which focused on the notion of the moving image as opposed to a story of the kind to be expected on stage. In the first half of the 19th century the still photographic image had made enough impact to make that kind of image the core of the cinematic process. It was only a later that an interest in drama and acting created the conventional division between fiction and real-life moving imagery. But sometimes that division dissolves in a given work, so that the documentary is not entirely realistic and the narrative film is not entirely fictional. Many narrative films shot in their own environment and employing locals in place of actors create a sort of restructured reality with its own drama, which is often even more powerful than the imagination. Many Iranian films follow this pattern, and achieved amazing results, with Samira Makhmalbaf's debut The Apple, which received special mention when it was screened in the Un Certain Regard programme at Cannes in 1998, being a being a clear example. Based on a real-life event that was reported by the Iranian press �ê" a man who literally locked up his two daughters for 12 years, afraid of the consequences for the honour of the family of their having any kind of social life �ê" the film comprises the two young women's own reenactment of their story, which is what Makhmalbaf managed to convince them of following the arrest of their father. In the same way as narrative cinema took on documentary features, so too did documentary cinema attempt to move away from conventional documentary techniques, coming closer to creative spaces traditionally reserved for narrative cinema. Michael Moore's work is an example of this, which is how it made contributed to making the conventional division between narrative and documentary subject to debate. The art of cinema is increasingly the art of audiovisual story telling irrespective of whatever else it might be. In this year's Abu Dhabi Film Festival many documentaries directed by landmark figures in narrative cinema were screened: Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, for example. Perhaps best known for The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, which won the grand jury prize at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, Herzog is among the most important German filmmakers in the last four decades, and he has received numerous awards. Cave of Forgotton Dreams, which was screened in 3D, is about one of the oldest works of art to be discovered by human beings: the Chauvet Cave paintings, discovered in the south of France in 1994, which are over 32,000 years old. The cave was closed to the public when Herzog and a four-man crew managed to gain access to make this beautiful piece. The appeal of the film is that it goes beyond documenting the paintings to registering early humanity's attempt to convey its awareness of the surroundings and also tries to work out the motives behind the cave paintings through interviews with geologists and anthropologists. It is slow paced and balanced, with a profoundly moving soundtrack and 3D imagery that turns the cave into the object of breathless contemplation that it is. Another 3D documentary screened in Abu Dhabi was Pina by another German who is better known for his narrative work, Wim Wenders �ê" winner of the Palme d'Or for Paris-Texas in 1984, among many other awards. Pina is dedicated to the late, great choreographer Pina Bausch, whose death in 2009 left numerous major figures grieving. After the 1999 landmark documentary on old and retired Cuban musicians, Buena Vista Social Club, Wenders offers a new kind of pleasure through modern dance. Made up of no more than a few memories linking Bausch to her dancers, the film is nonetheless a desperate attempt on the part of Wenders to separate his own aesthetic from that of Bausch, whose Caf�� Muller features heavily. With incredible skill, Wenders translates the dance into scenes from the city, on the street and in the metro. Yet it is Bausch's dances that make up the greater appeal of the film, with music and 3D imagery making a powerful impact.
