The brief for the program is “Power, sexual freedom, and the politics of standing up for what you believe in”.  Sometimes the documentary filmmakers point the camera at themselves, telling their own stories. And at others, they point the camera to the world that grows at a different pace than their subjects, which the subjects have different feelings about. Those feelings understandably exist while these subjects either create art or just be themselves.

Sarah Grant exposes a lot of herself in her documentary short debut Big Moves, a thing that normally happens when one tells their story. A plus sized woman, she learned how to dance during the pandemic. The short shows her feelings of sharing spaces with people with traditional dancer bodies who respect her presence. Insecurities never go away though, a thing she explains as she narrates while recreating iconic dance scenes in films. A simple short, but there’s something fascinating about her confidence that’s growing in the context of her framing herself.

There are at least two kinds of aesthetics that viewers can see in the short Audio and the Alligator. There’s the occasional night time cinematography mixing with natural scenes that the short doesn’t try to overdo, thankfully. It tells the story of a man trying to prove to his family that there’s an alligator in their rural Venezuelan home. Big enough stakes, but within that story is an Indigenous family thriving and finding joy. The happiness and realist approach to the subject matter makes the short the best one in the fest.

The program gives us another piece of cinematic representation of Indigenous people with the short A Woman Thinking. Three directors are at the helm here, one of them being an Amazonian Indigenous filmmaker, Aida Hakira Yanomami. She double-duties as a narrator, telling the viewers how a shaman makes yaokana, a powder he uses for spiritual rituals. The short doesn’t really explain yakoana but it doesn’t feel like it has to do that. The end titles do a lot of the work but it shows the connection between the political and the spiritual.

Politics is a topic that viewers can see in Dorothy Allen-Pickard’s documentary short We Did Not Consent. It also touches on the idea of perfection, on how to perfectly capture a traumatic moment in the lives of British female activists. Those activists fought for causes like animal rights and allyship towards freeing Palestine. Undercover officers, many of them married, infiltrated groups of all levels and unnecessarily had sexual relationships with them. The short is basically reenactments of pillow talk where the actual activists and victims corrected actors improvising scenes about the formers’ experiences. A part of me was just like “Give these actors a script” but there are levels to this. Take one may be the public perception, take two is closer to reality, but we all know, as the short does, that cinema can’t always capture reality. The best filmmakers can do is try.