É Tudo Verdade / It's All True

Observe, Pay Attention

Reflecting on his craft, Eisenstein argues that cinema should pay a tribute to literature for what is most relevant to it: “the art of observing – not just seeing but observing”. Acceptable for the cinema in general, the suggestion of the Soviet filmmaker is especially significant to take for granted the documentary.

Different from fiction, which is directed to the world to recreate a circumstance of the human condition, the documentary creates its circumstance at the moment of recording, of capture, at the moment in which the equipment works: to observe and to listen. When observed, reality escapes, flirting with the game of scene. But the encounter between the filmmaker and the world remains captured by the camera. If this is the possible truth, it should not be neglected.

In its fullness, the documentary welcomes narratives that allow us to observe the world and to recognize it more effectively than what occurs, in general, in fiction. By hosting part of It`s All True Documentary Film Festival program, which gathers selected exemples of these high exercises of documental language, Sesc reassures its interest in the diffusion of narratives that contest reallity and propose a sharper observation of the world - to pay attention to it, to understand it and to transform it.

Danilo Santos de Miranda - Regional Director of Sesc São Paulo