Docufilm Festival

By organizing a DocuFilm Festival we would like to create a platform for students to learn and share ideas about a topic, related to international cooperation, social justice an/or sustainable development which is interesting enough to trigger a discussion.

The choice for the medium is motivated by its accessibility for students through a combination of entertainment and content. The documentaries shown during the festival are shown to inform and to trigger discussions.

To give you an idea, in May 2009, OtherWise organised a film festival on Migration. The festival started off with a theatre performance by the International Theatre Group, with the performance: Somewhere between here and the island. This was a very nice performance showing people’s identities and reactions to stressfull situations, such as being on a boat together somewhere between here and an island. Find the report of the festival here.

‘Somewhere between here and the Island’, opening of Docufilm festival 2009.

The OtherWise Docufilm Festival in 2010 was centered on the topic of “Land Claim & Creating Borders”.  In the duration of one month, Four theme-centered evenings were organised; Week 1: Sacred Lands, Week 2: Creating Borders, Week 3: Claiming Land, and Week 4: This in your Mind!

The festival started with students seeing Signs with “This is Mine” on different parts of “land” in Wageningen city.

Here an example of a summary of one of the evenings:

Week 4: This is in your Mind!

After a lovely summer day, the CosyMo’s Solar Cinema was ready for screening our last movie “No Man’s land”, portraying the dramatic story of two enemy soldiers Ciki, a Bosniak and Nino, a Bosnian Serb, who are trapped in the no man’s land between their front lines. With a balanced sense of dark humor it shows the complexities of the war between Bosnia and Serbia (1992-1995). Before the movie started, exotic snacks and drinks were provided by Vreemde Streken from 9:00 onwards. A small group started taking out their blankets and went along with the laid-back atmosphere. Between the trees, colorful Tibetan-looking prayer flags were hanging about, though when you looked closer, participants had been asked to create an item which resembled their national identity attached with a small card including a quote, remark, statement on: “What is national identity to you?” Some statements were, “Mental borders exist”, “National identity=the feeling of belongingess” and “National identity is in your head”.

When the sun went down around 10:30pm, the Solar Cinema was set up and prepared for screening. A closing speech was given by Kira de Groot, who gave a short overview of all the Docufilm nights and the night itself. Solar Cinema then showed a short movie on how it is possible to take film to the audience in an environmentally-friendly way. Even though, as the night persisted, it got colder and colder, the atmosphere on the other hand got cosier and cosier.