For the video-documentary competition in this year’s 22nd session of the Carthage Film Festival, 16 long documentaries and 12 short films, the majority of which are fiction, were selected.

In tune with the reality of Arabs and Africans today, the documentaries, in a personal way, tackle current events, conflicts and problems in the region. We wanted to give visibility to minority points of view that get lost in the muddle of televised images.

While the media are caught up in the events of the moment, we propose lucid, demanding discourse where intellectual honesty is the basis for formal reflection. The essential criteria behind our choices were, in effect, how the authors engaged in presenting their respective environments around a humanistic vision and a sense of artistic risk.

We are therefore, in the presence of “oeuvres”, in the true sense of the word, and it’s exactly this notion that we would like to bring back into favor by creating a program full of films with a rebellious temperament. These documentaries show that artistic level is not proportional to technical and financial means.

Filmed often with very low budgets, that not meant in a derisive way, they have in common the urgency to show, the necessity to communicate and the duty to teach everyone to avoid the beaten path. They represent what can work in situations where the documentary remains marginalized by the economic system and an instrument of political propaganda.

This year’s selections, which show the excellent level attained by documentaries in the region, look to maintain the degree to which the spirit of investigation allies with the subjectivity conferred to video acclaim. We wish to show that video is not just a by-product, but well and good, a form in its own right; a windfall for demanding people who know how to benefit from the development of technology.

One will notice a number of important films by women in this selection. It is for us a way of affirming, henceforth, that the parity between the sexes is vital in a natural way for documentary creativity, because the very nature of this genre calls on the responsibility of the citizens, wishing above all to be a democratic expression.

Hichem Ben Ammar