É Tudo Verdade / It's All True

AN X-RAY OF THE REAL

By appropriating the real as raw material, cinema has—since the consolidation of its language back in the early 20th century—availed of the “realism of reality” as a source of verisimilitude in narrative-building, whether fictional or documentary. For even fiction needs to dig into the codes of reality–signals, meanings, directions–in order to recreate it as horror, comedy, adventure, and magic realism, among other genres.

The documentary, for its part, has gained esteem in recent decades, especially for the reinventions ushered in by its makers. Polyvalent in terms of theme, documentaries address an endless variety of issues: from subjectivity to social and political causes; from artistic movements to cultural trends; from a critique of the current state of things to a return to the historical.

Beyond production, their dissemination has also gained space, reaching into theaters and homes, and earning more screen and eye time. It is in this context that the partnership between Sesc and It’s All True has taken root: in the promotion of historical and contemporary documentary productions.

This year, feature-length films from the Latin-American Focusand The State of Thingsshows will be screened. The Sesc Digital Platform, in the meantime, will be showing foreign short films that offer up diverse sociocultural prisms and approaches to the real. What’s more, Sesc will be hosting four online lectures with researchers on documentary cinema and all its ramifications.

For Sesc, which pursues ongoing plural sociocultural and educational actions, the goal is to ensure that different audiences share the same opportunity to get to know other points of view, expand their own horizons, and aggregate meanings to reality, taking cinema as an X-ray in this sensible mediation of the real.

Danilo Santos de Miranda
Sesc São Paulo Regional Director