IDFA films: Why Cinéma Vérité Is Still So Powerful

At IDFA 2015, the largest documentary film festival in the world, a good clutch of films, marked by their strong allegiance to observational-style cinéma vérité, demonstrated the power of the form to reveal insights hidden from the headlines. 

Cinéma vérité is the favorite whipping boy for many filmmakers, not least Errol Morris, who congratulated himself once again while at IDFA for rebelling against its tenets, and Fred Wiseman, whose latest work was also on display there. And no one would want to mistake cinéma vérité for uncut reality. 

But over the decades, the distance between those who claimed they only observed (and didn’t acknowledge their role in shaping either the reality they filmed or the story they eventually told) and those who wanted to provoke realities they could film has shrunk. Technical capacities have grown while costs have plummeted, creating possibilities for stories in places and from people we could never have heard from before. 

Experience as story.

The invitation to live with people whose lives you may never even have imagined, to be faced with their choices and meet the people and circumstances that condition them, is a chance to see into unimagined worlds.

Cinéma vérité is sometimes used by filmmakers for its seeming transparency, to make claims for truthfulness and fairness, and it was clear with some of the standouts at IDFA that the form itself allowed filmmakers to stand behind their subjects. As one Chinese filmmaker said, “We use cinéma vérité because Chinese people think that is ‘real’ documentary,” unlike much of Chinese TV, which is well recognized as crafted for official messages.  

But well-crafted cinéma vérité always honors the power of a story revealed by a filmmaker through the experiences chronicled. 

Movies that can’t go home again.

Several of the IDFA cinéma vérité standouts came from China, where independent documentarians are daring to tell stories that can’t always go home again after showing at international festivals. Zanbo Zhang’s The Road is a suitable successor to last year’s award-winning festival shocker, The Chinese Mayor (by Hao Zhou). It follows the construction of a road project in provincial China, where the corruption and high-handedness of the private construction firm (Oh, that was your house? Your tree? Your grandmother? Talk to someone else) match and sometimes butt head-on with that of the local officials (Really? No bribe? Meet our thugs). In between are the workers, the residents, and some of the frustrated middle managers. 

The film is constructed in five chapters, each featuring conflicts in the course of the road’s construction, until the last moment, when the road’s opening and national holidays offer a stark contrast between participants’ cynicism and official pomp. The film is eye-opening at every level, not least that of giving us knowledge of daily life and daily work in a country we have too few mental images of. 

Patriots and migrants.

Two other Chinese films also demonstrated that The Road is not a fluke exercise in cinema verite.  Du Haibin’s A Young Patriot follows a wildly patriotic high school student as he goes to college and his understanding of what constitutes responsible patriotism becomes much, much more complicated. It too offers unprecedented glimpses into Chinese life—a political science class where a prof blithely explains Chinese exceptionalism, for instance, and a student charity trip to give children of ethnic migrant workers of the booming industrial economy a crash course in reading and math, since they are left along with the aged and infirm in a town abandoned even by its teachers. And the central character’s evolution is compelling. 

Another example is Yun Ye’s Look Love, which follows two children—one rich, one poor, but both children of internal-migrant workers who have had to abandon them to provide for them. Seeing their daily lives, one at boarding school and one a dropout aimlessly looking for trouble, makes you feel the collateral emotional damage of a huge displacement that is said to account for some 300 million people in China. 

Whether such work will be shown in China is doubtful, but it probably will be shown in Europe and the US; several of the Chine