About
The LIDF is the UK’s largest documentary festival. Running each year for just over two weeks, it unfolds at many venues across London and offers an unprecedented snapshot of the contemporary world.
Presented in association with the London Review of Books, the largest circulating literary magazine in Europe, the LIDF adopts a questioning, critical attitude to the cultural, social and political issues of the day, engaging with filmmakers, their subjects, and our audience to create a highly distinct environment for cultural interaction.
The LIDF believes that film is a powerful tool for connecting people, for creating debate, for stirring empathy, compassion and ultimately action. As such the festival exists as a part of the public sphere of dialogue and interaction, not just a film festival, but a festival of ideas.
The responsibility of filmmakers towards their subject is often talked about – quite rightly, there are ethical and moral dimensions in claiming and representing slices of reality, intimate lives and moments, or broad historical subjects. But, there is also a responsibility on us as an audience. We cannot be passive, or uncritical in the reading of a film. And this responsibility to be active in our appreciation of the films is even more important today when documentary films are powerful providers of knowledge and opinion, with the potential to inspire direct action.
This is why the ‘conversations’ we host, the panel discussions, are so integral to the festival. We hope that these conversations extend long before lights up and provide even greater depth and appreciation of both the works themselves and their subject matter. The films are always both pretext and context for discussion. Always entertaining, moving, and provocative. Our encounter with the images is an opportunity to go beyond the films themselves and escape the, all too common, sense that there is nothing anyone can do about anything.
If documentary films are so welcome today it is because they prepare a route that leads from empathy, to insight, to action. Empathy and compassion are everything, and at the same time nothing if they remain merely an emotional state, however powerful. Documentary films are also an antidote to the trivialising and closed public discourse we are too often surrounded by. In these films complex realities are allowed to remain complex, rhetoric and slogans are avoided and conclusions open ended. It is for us to work out our own conclusions, to revel in this complexity rather than be oppressed by it. The stories we tell and the stories we choose not to tell say a great deal about our assumptions, often naive, about ourselves and the world we live in.
We cannot suggest that any film, or any cultural output, is a panacea, yet it can be part of a process in which the key protagonist is the viewer, the reader, the interpreter. The film/audience relationship is at the heart of the festival. The films we show can take us by the hand and provide that rare thing: that collective moment when, with the help of others, we can see ourselves, and our relations with others, just that little bit clearer. Patrick Hazard, Founder and Director, LIDF
At a time when the practice of high quality investigative journalism is under threat and the very future of newspaper uncertain, the role of documentary film in keeping us properly informed has become vital. That’s why at the London Review of Books – a magazine devoted to deeply considered, carefully researched journalism – we feel a kindred spirit with the LIDF. The essay in film and the essay on the page are parallel approaches to the same objective: to open up the underside of realities that are so often presented as superficial. Nicholas Spice, Publisher, London Review of Books
