By Peter Bowen

Documentary film festivals, simply by the nature of their fare, present a sweeping spectacle of man’s inhumanity to man. At this year’s Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival (March 10 —19), for example, film after film chronicled war, poverty, racism, violence and other dubious human achievements. To be fair, the films are, as the Festival’s overarching theme “Images of the 21st Century” suggests, merely reflections of the times we live in. In dark times as these, documentaries bear the responsibility to illuminate such tragedy. But many of the films pushed to inspire as well. The opening night documentary, Danish filmmakers Simone Aaberg Kaern and Magnus Bejmar’s Smiling in a War Zone was about a plucky Danish artist/flyer who navigated a tiny Piper-Colt airplane from Copenhagen to Afghanistan to meet a young teenager girl who wanted to become a fighter pilot — just in case the Taliban returned.

Founded eight years ago by Dimitri Eipides as a offshoot of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival held in late November, the doc festival has grown to become a notable stopping off spot for doc filmmakers and European buyers, especially as the accompanying doc market has grown more robust. For Eipides, “the market provides a intimate location for buyers, and a cheaper alternative for channels in the Balkans.” But while the Festival is attentive to film commerce, its primary audience is local. Epidides acknowledges that when he started, Greek audiences saw docs as something “not for adults, just for students. I wanted to prove that these films are also entertainment.” With this year’s attendance peaking at 34,845 people (nearly double the number of attendees in 2005), Epides has clearly made his point.

The festival, which hosted a series of panels, conferences and master classes, deftly integrated the international documentary film world with local Greek films and filmmakers. The health and diversity of Greeks documentaries was demonstrated in a program (and catalog) singling out Greek docs. In addition there was a side bar entitled “Exandas: Documentaries of the World” that presented the work of a ground-breaking Greek television investigative reporting series. And while Greek docs were presented to the international audience attending, world-class documentary filmmakers made themselves available to local Greek students in a series of three master classes: one led by British filmmaker Kim Longinotto, a three-day course with Canadian Peter Wintonick and a final one with Danish Jon Bang Carlsen.

Despite branding its homegrown work, the festival for the most part eschewed nationalistic categories, opting instead to curate its films by various narrative tropes: “Views of the World,” “Stories to Tell,” “Recordings of Memory,” “Portraits: Human Journeys,” and “Habitat” -- topics broad enough to hang many films on, but also pointed enough to provoke reflection on the discursive nature of documentary. “Stories to Tell,” for example, contained both Valerie Kontakos’s Who’s On First and Gary Tarn’s Black Sun. The first film straightforwardly chronicles the comedy of errors that occurred when Greece (who has no history with baseball) attempted to put together a team for the 2004 Olympic Games. Black Sun, on other the hand, was an artful, poetic work that mirrored the voiced-over story of blind artist Hugues de Montalembert with a series of impressionistic images shot by director (and composer) Tarn. The overall effect is a profoundly original and moving meditation on the nature of sight, memory and compassion.

For the most part, however, documentaries were focused on contemporary political subjects, and, as such, the festival identified three areas of interest — “Globalization,” “Africa — Unresolved Issues,” and “The Politics of Violence.” Two films, Thomas Balmes’s A Decent Factory and Micha Peled’s China Blue explored factory working conditions in China (although only Balmes’ film was incorporated in the series on Globalization).

The African series provided a powerful testament to the complexities of that country, from Thomas Allen Harris’s “the personal-is-political” piece Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela to Ali Samadi Ahadi and Oliver Stoltz’s heartbreaking Lost Children, about the plight of Uganda youth kidnapped and forced to become soldiers for the Lord’s Resistance Army. Another powerful African doc — although not in this series — was was Kim Longinotto’s Sisters in Law about a court house in Cameroon presided over by a women.

As one might expect, the “violence” category spanned the globe. US filmmaker Andrew Berends’s The Blood of My Brother — A Story of Death in Iraq, is a remarkable addition to the already diverse work coming out of Iraq. Like James Longley’s award-winning Iraq in Fragments, Berends’s story focuses on the local population, in particular how the death of a local citizen effects his family and those about him. Likewise Steven Silver and Andrew Quigley’s Diameter of a Bomb steps back from a 2002 terrorist attack on a bus in Jerusalem that left 20 people dead to consider the full extent of devastation that would normally just be scanned in the headlines.

The truly international flavor of Thessaloniki was made apparent not simply by the global range of attending filmmakers and industry people, but by the trans-national focus of many films. It is customary for Europeans and Americans to travel to Africa and Asia to tell their stories. The opening night film Smiling in a War Zone made that journey its’ very subject matter. And other films, like Luc Schaedler’s Angry Monk — Reflections on Tibet (a Swiss film on Tibet), Jan van den Berg’s Deacon of Death (a Dutch film on Cambodia), or Erez T. Yanuv Barzilay’s A Cry for Madiom (a Canadian film on the Sudan crisis), demonstrate the traditional focus of first-world filmmakers importing third-world subject matter.

This year, however, many foreign films set their sights on America. The Danish film Gitmo — The New Rules of War chronicles the adventures of filmmakers Erik Gandini and Tarik Saleh as they visit America and its prison for illegal combatants at Guantanamo Bay to uncover the truth about the one Swedish prisoner housed there. Yorgos Avgeropoulos’s War S.A. gives a Greek look on the US deployment of contract soldiers in Iraq. And French documentary, Mathieu Verboud and Jean Robert Viallet’s Tranquility Bay ends up in Utah to expose the racket of re-education camps, which are basically walled encampments that parents pay large amounts of money to a private company to basically incarcerate their children in. It really is a small world after all.