THE documentary programme which has run throughout the 10 days of this year's film festival has been an impressive and highly enjoyable cross section of styles and subjects, which demonstrate the enormous potential for non fiction films to be inventive, personal, lyrical or autobiographical, and the increasing blurring of boundaries between documentary and fiction.
Top of the list for wit, imagination, and a wonderfully tongue in cheek tone is Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver, a spoof biographical portrait of a forgotten pioneer of cinema from New Zealand called Colin McKenzie, which uses all the solemnity of the genre - including pastiche archive footage, solemn, hyperbolic voice over, and earnest talking heads - to reconstruct the life and times of this unrecognised genius. Great fun.
Accompanying this was a sensitive, sympathetic portrait of the late Polish director, Krysztof Kieslowski, I'm So So, made by his former assistant, Kryzystof Wierzbicki. Resolutely avoiding the temptation to make self important, oracular statements, Kieslowski gazes steadily at the camera, pulling on a cigarette and reflecting on his life's work, including The Dekalog and his Three Colours trilogy.
All his films, he said, were open to many interpretations. "I don't know anything. Knowing is not my business; not knowing is. When asked what he intended to do with his life, having stopped making films, he replied simply: "Nothing".
Microcosmos, by the French directors Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou, was a beautifully photographed study of insect life, which used stop motion photography and microscopic close ups to scrutinise the variety, rhythms, mating rituals and dramas of the natural world against the background of a comically grandiose soundtrack. While this was a visual treat, at 75 minutes it tested the interest of those of us who don't have an abiding passion for entomology.
Copy deadlines don't allow time to comment on Carlos Saura's filmed dance performance, Flamenco, which is the final, promised treat, of a programme of films that has demonstrated the diversity and flexibility of the documentary form.
