Caring, context, community: Cintía Gil on the ethos of Sheffield DocFest 2021

▶︎ Sheffield DocFest 2021 runs 4 to 13 June online and with screenings in cinemas in Sheffield and beyond.

• See also: 13 films to watch at Sheffield DocFest 2021 – by the programmers

The co-director of Portugal’s esteemed Doclisboa had come north seeking the challenge of steering a festival she saw as “trying to have a more internationalist conversation” in a Brexit setting, as she explains below – “so there was clear political, and aesthetic, poetic, work that could be done”. But in 2020 Covid-19 put paid to her team’s first draft.

Still, a silver lining: “It forced us to go back to the bone and be clear about what was important.” Competitions weren’t. Audience engagement was, and while DocFest reluctantly fell back on online access, it opened its reach across time as well as space, with some films available from June through to November. Most important though was “the physical experience of cinema”, and at screenings in Sheffield last summer and autumn Gil relished “meeting every audience member and learning why they were there and what the festival should and shouldn’t be.”

For 2021 the festival is gingerly rebuilding its big-screen ambitions, while retaining some of the virtual interactions established last year, not least for its Meet Market funding forum, through which DocFest hopes to help filmmakers who might not have the resources to travel even in an open season. This year’s festival will run for ten days rather than the usual five, with every film given one cinema screening as well as online exhibition; six titles, including the opener, Questlove’s Summer of Soul, and the closer, a world premiere of Mark Cousins’s new The Story of Looking, will also be screened outside Sheffield, bringing a taste of the festival nationwide. Competitions are back, with the emphasis on world and international premieres – not for bragging purposes but “to diversify what’s on the table”, Gil says.

Other awards will cherry-pick from the festival’s four new strands: Into the World, mixing globally established filmmakers and topical subjects (Hara Kazuo’s latest Japanese muckraker; Dan Reed on 9/11); Rhyme and Rhythm, for films that engage with other arts; Rebellions, investigating the interplay of film and politics, not least stories of Black radicalism; and Ghosts and Apparitions, celebrating the oblique, experimental and evocative side of nonfiction film language. There’s also a retrospective programme, bringing past films into present debates – this year ‘fragments from the history of Black British Cinema’, programmed by six guests, from filmmakers Campbell X and Judah Attille to historian David Olusoga.

As for the ethos behind the festival’s programming, Gil talks about caring for films – she contrasts online platforms that proclaim breadth of access while letting films sink from view – by acknowledging and building context, as documentary itself acknowledges voices and creatively shapes the worlds they exist in. Most of all, she talks about community and collective engagement – “to support films that will expand conversations and our awareness of the world’s complexities and diversity.” The conversation below has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.

Nick Bradshaw: What were your original ambitions when you joined Sheffield DocFest in 2019? 

Cintía Gil: DocLisboa was the first festival I ever directed – while also programming a lot, building audiences, working for the whole spectrum of what a festival is; I don’t separate those tasks. It was a learning curve, and we and I experimented a lot. I’d been feeling it was time to move on; the team there with me were growing and becoming amazing programmers – and I don’t like the idea of becoming an institution, myself.

So Sheffield DocFest was an attractive challenge, though I did think about it a lot. I felt it could be interesting to be in a country that, on the one hand, was economically rich, compared to Portugal, where support for filmmakers and artists could be more effective, and I could have a word in the ways that support could be channelled. On the other hand it’s a country with such massive inequality – not to mention Brexit, which I still believe will change the shape of Europe in the long term. So, coming from a colonialist country to a colonialist and imperialist country, there was clear political, and aesthetic, poetic, work that could be done.

How had you perceived the festival from the outside?

I saw Sheffield DocFest as trying to have a more internationalist conversation. And I felt that was urgent, and I could contribute to that in a strong manner because of my background. No festival in Portugal can survive without an internationalist stance – because the country is poor. So I did have that experience, and felt it was really interesting to go to a Brexiteer country and fight for an internationalist cultural organisation.

Since then it has only become more interesting. I felt that conversations in the UK around inequality, ethnic and class inequality, racial oppression and imperialism have become stronger. And of course sometimes that brings a confrontational moment, but at the same time it brings opportunities to tackle some questions which need to be tackled, and which film and cinema have been tackling for a long time; filmmakers have been doing incredible work around that in interesting ways.

What did the pandemic change? 

Everything, right? We just had to go back on everything. But film festivals are not the hardest place in the world to work and live in: we’re not working in a hospital; we’re in the UK… I don’t like to complain about Covid-19 in the context of an organisation like Sheffield DocFest, to be honest.

For us it was an opportunity to be really clear about the mission of the festival and the organisation as a charity, because sometimes when we make film festivals we want to do everything, to put every idea in place – there’s a kind of giantism syndrome. Covid forced us to go back to the bone and be clear about what was really important.

So: no competitions, because we felt asking people to compete in a year like that was kind of aggressive.

The other thing was the physical cinema experience. So we said, okay, we need to exist as a festival and give our audiences the opportunity to engage: let’s do a programme online, but not as a festival contained in a short time, so we hosted it for more than a month; some of the films were [even] online from June to November.

But [we also wanted to] honour the physical experience of cinema. So we programmed four weekenders [through the autumn]. That was amazing. It was a time when Sheffield was devastated by Covid, and not so many people were coming to the cinema. But we showed these four hours of Ogawa [Shinsuke]’s film [A Japanese Village: Furuyashiki, 1982], and had a bunch of people really happy to see that film in the cinema, and many others. It was also incredible to speak to every audience member and understand why they were there, what they expected from the festival and what they felt it should and shouldn’t be. It became a very interesting lab.

What have you learnt from lockdown programming, and what do you think its legacy will be?

I think there are two levels to that question. There’s the personal: what it is to do the exercise of programming when we are just meeting online – and that’s awful and painful, because we should be watching discussing films together. It’s a completely different way of communicating, without body language and basic [signs] like that; everything is based on the verbal, which is a problem because it’s exclusionary.

The other level is: how can the festival take advantage of these tools? I think they have some interesting features: for example, allowing people who would not be able to join the festival physically anyway, perhaps because they do not have the financial capacity, to feel they can participate through the online. I feel it makes the Meet Market projects and industry programme much more accessible. It’s a way of opening the gates to more people and territories.

On the other hand I think we need to be careful: always with a pinch of salt the possibilities of the online. These ideas that we can enact ideas of freedom and democracy through the online I find to be deep fallacies. Online is not necessarily more accessible: you need to know what you’re looking for in order to find it, right? So we definitely want to continue doing strong physical editions of the festival, and use the online only when we feel that it opens and expands access and possibility, but not letting go of ethical and discursive tools that we need to have, and ethical principles that we need to keep.

For example not throwing films in the landscape without any context or care. The idea of caring for films is something very important, and that care is even more needed in the online.

For us as programmers, too: I think a film programmer grows with the public, with feedback, conversation. Personally, I grew with that. So we need that care for our work and our future. 

We never shared much enthusiasm, but we acknowledged that the online is an important and an interesting too. Especially when we want to work with people across the world: Soukaina Aboulaoula in Marrakech, who’s curating our online arts programme, is doing a wonderful job opening it up to artists and ideas that we would never be able to reach because they’re not on our horizon: I’m sure that’ll have consequences for the future, and she’s in Marrakech, and that’s the nice side of the online.

What are your responsibilities to different powerbases across the UK screen industries?

It’s one thing to fight for film-language freedom, for the space to invent language, to open ways and experiment on film. It’s another thing to have a hardline stance against television; I never had that, even in DocLisboa. I grew up in small towns, I was raised by television; I watched In Vanda’s Room for the first time on television. I feel television is a very powerful tool for reflecting society. The question is whether much television may or not restrict or conform the way the world is portrayed, and the relation filmmakers have with what they’re doing.

So it’s true that Sheffield DocFest has a history with television – although the big majority of its money is public funds – BFI, Arts Council, Wellcome Trust. We do have funds from BBC, Channel 4 – but the gap is big and the major funders are public.

I do believe UK television is still doing some very interesting things; and those interesting things that we feel have a space in the festival will continue to do so. But also there are many things beyond television in the UK. We are opening the UK competition this year with filmmakers and artists from different places and different spectrums in the country; and what we are trying to do is say these talents and these people need to be looked and supported in an international context. It’s not about saying we don’t programme television, or this is a television festival; it’s really about what we are showing. Every film comes into the festival with the same dignity. So, again: it’s a question of when television is opening ways and opportunities, in the sense of expanding possibilities – or when television is operating as a normalising influence, minimising the opportunities and the spectrum of work. 

How do you position Sheffield relative to other international documentary festivals?

For me the fact that the festival is in Sheffield should inspire its internationalist identity. I believe no festival is a supermarket; every festival has an identity very much linked to where it takes place, and the community that has brought it together. The questions and focuses that Sheffield DocFest has will always be shaped by its community and its place – so Sheffield being one of the places in northern Europe where you have the biggest gaps of class, finance, access, being not the centre of the empire.

That’s one of the most interesting differences for me between my previous festival and this one – that it’s not based in a capital city. So that should inspire the nature of the festival, and actually I’ve been having conversations with other documentary festivals that are not in capitals: FID Marseille, Dokufest in Prizren, Ji.hlava, Porto/Post/Doc. It’s interesting the way that programmes and thoughts are shaped by that characteristic.

I don’t like the idea that I would give you three lines on what you could find in DocFest; it’s a marketing approach that I don’t like. I don’t like the discourse of ‘we’re showing the best or the strongest’; it’s not about that. It’s about what kind of ecology you are building; what kinds of conversations and links between the world and the films, the works and artists, will you, as a filmmaker or cinephile or programmer, find in this festival? Under my direction, Sheffield DocFest will never be a place where you just go look through a list of films put together because they are the best or the strongest of the year; it will always be a place where you go and engage films and conversations because they make a sense between them. I always see a programme as a diagram. In our heads there are diagrams, links between the different [elements of the festival], and they should build a conversation that is meaningful for those who attend the festival, be it in the UK or outside.

Another question is about the selection committee we have put together. We have critics, programmers, filmmakers, producers from the UK, Brazil, Portugal, France; they have all different backgrounds, but each person’s focus is towards a deeply internationalist perspective, for example in trying to deconstruct or at least question the Eurocentric vision of film and film language; trying to question the economic power of some countries and even the notion of co-production. When you have films from the South that are co-productions with the North, what does that do to a film? Who is making it? What is its economy? Where does it come from? How was it produced? That is something that is thoroughly discussed sometimes in the selection committee.

So internationalist is not just about how many countries we are showing; it’s also about the kinds of economy we are bringing. How many kinds of cooperation? What kinds of context? And how do we ensure that everything is treated equally and we’re not building hierarchies according to economical value and geopolitical power?

That’s also why we brought to the same level the Film, Art and Exchange programmes. The Exchange programme, for example, is about the relations of film, science, planetary health, etc. But we added the question of climate justice, which brings in economy and politics and poetic strategies, and that was basically Jamie’s remit, to bring these things together. So when we are presenting film and artworks and conversations, conversations can be deeply important. That’s why programming an internationalist film festival is not just about ‘showcasing’. Showcasing is the worst way of defining a film festival. It’s about building context, about technology and discourse, setting up the place for voices that exist so they can be heard by more people in an equal manner.

[To be reductive], there are two ways of looking at the history of documentary. One says documentary gives voice to, and another that says documentary acknowledges voices, and builds context, and creatively shapes universes where those different voices take shape in a more expanded field. And we take that [latter] side.

How will you build that context?

The idea is that films bring certain conversations to the table, and we can build opportunities to respond to those conversations with new ones and keep this running as an ongoing conversation.

From a cynical perspective, film festivals are useless, right? We have the internet, we have cinemas. So why have film festivals? Of course we can say there’s a market to fill: a money market or a symbolic value market, which is an equally capitalistic perspective. But why are we doing Sheffield DocFest? We want to support films that will expand conversations, expand our awareness of the world’s complexities and diversity, and transform reality. A film festival is a super powerful tool to transform reality. How do you transform reality? You engage people in collective conversations.

That’s the strongest point of a film festival: it’s a collective experience. The idea is to have our heads around all the potential of what we are showing, as a means of enabling expansion and transformative experiences. That’s why it’s not just showcasing. Because if you show a film like, for example, The Inheritance, by Ephraim Asili, without any expanding conversation, without building any context, you’re just showing it to the converted.

With our industry programme, the DocFest Meet Market, too, we’re being very thorough in choosing projects that can build links to the conversations that we are having in our artistic programme. And we’re expanding our reach into different countries, and to younger and more senior filmmakers.

So it’s about expanding and making sure we can be as open as possible, in terms of the number of languages and poetic strategies and economies and politics that we show, so that our audiences and delegates have a feeling of the richness of contemporary existing filmmaking and arts.

Most of all, it’s about expanding imaginations, about the value of collective imagination. [Look at] the world we live in: fascism is rising everywhere; [in April] we had a fascist demonstration [in Lisbon] that was really scary; nobody thought it would be so big. It’s happening all over the UK.

The first consequence of that is limiting imaginations. What do fascists want? They want to limit your imaginations, to lower the ceiling. So when we talk about expansion, it’s first and foremost expanding imagination.

So this year, in concrete terms, we’re having unfortunately only one physical screening in the cinema, because we have fewer slots, although we did expand the festival into a ten-day festival, so we have a nicer, more relaxed programme in which films are not packed in many venues back-to-back from 9am to 11pm.

Every film will have a physical screening and also be online: the Arts and Exchange programmes also will have physical and online parts. The Industry programme will be online because it’s important to have it available to every international delegate who wants to attend meetings etc. But we are really keen on doing a physical programme dedicated to our public.

We brought back competitions but with a change in structure. The International Competition is mainly built with international and world premieres. We’re not saying these are the best films of the year; we’re saying they need, deserve attention, bring something we find deeply relevant and important. So it’s about trying to diversify what’s on the table. 

[Similarly] the UK Competition is to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of filmmaking in the UK. I think there’s a lack of work on the internationalisation of independent UK filmmakers – this is a really interesting group of films and filmmakers that I believe should have more international visibility.

Then we have the First Feature competition, shorts… and a number of other awards across the film programme strands.

The idea of the annual retrospective is quite important to us. It’s not about having a historicist’s take on the history of nonfiction cinema, not just travelling to the past; it’s about acknowledging the potential of history, the contemporary [relevance] of films from different times and how important they are to contemporary conversations. So this year we have the retrospective on Black British film history, programmed by a group of different guest curators [filmmakers Campbell X, George Amponsah and Judah Attille, programmers Anthony Andrews and Teanne Andrew, curator and writer Karen Alexander and historians David Olusoga and Mark Sealy].

Of the strands, we have Into the World, bringing established filmmakers from the history of film and documentary together with important topics and discussions – and films from different parts of the world with different contexts and ways of looking at politics and social topics. We’ll have the new Hara Kazuo film; a Dan Reed film called In the Shadow of 9/11 that talks about the escalation of paranoia and FBI strategies to invent terrorists [in the aftermath] of 9/11.

Rhyme & Rhythm is a strand that works on the crossings between film and other art practices: music, performative arts, literature, etc. 

Rebellions investigates political film language: how film form is shaped by political circumstances and how it responds to political circumstances. And that’s ‘political’ in a broad sense, from the macro to the micro, acknowledging that politics can be in love, bearing a child, whatever. 

Finally, Ghosts & Apparitions deals with the way nonfiction film responds and relates to and experiments with language: how fiction is an important tool in so many contexts – for documenting history and reality, for example, when you’re talking about indigenous history in so many countries and about communities that have been [rendered invisible]. Or essay film, or experimentations with form. Ghosts and Apparitions’s title celebrates the idea of cinema as a ghostly or hypnotic encounter that expands your mind. It’s the Abel Gance side of history, and then you have the Lumière side of history in other strands.

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Corrections (2 June 2021): this interview originally credited Cintía Gil with co-founding as well as co-directing DocLisboa; she did not. And the fascist demonstration she reported took place in her hometown of Lisbon, not Sheffield.