In 2007, the London International Documentary Festival (LIDF) started as a one day event. Now in its fourth year, the festival has grown rapidly into a 16 day event spread across the capital. Playing host to not only films from all over the world – including a retrospective of the inimitable Don Boyd – but also presenting photography and multimedia events, the LIDF looks set to be one of the most diverse and exciting film festivals of the year.
Cherwell spoke to Patrick Hazard, LIDF organiser, about this year’s festival.
How do you go about selecting the films for the festival?
It’s an enormous job. The number of submissions that we get is extremley high…this year we got many more direct submissions from directors and distribution companies who would like to choose London over another festival.
Since the 2007, how has the festival changed?
Not much is different really, I think the ethos of the festival has remained the same which is this idea of ‘Conversations in Film’; we want to try to eke out the issues and subject matter of the film by working very hard on the debates and discussions that we hold around the screenings. We try to link the films to notions of social change, critical debate and try to satisfy the documentary audience…we wanted to get a little bit away from the notion of just a director’s Q&A and more towards an ideas event.
There’s a multimedia event on at the Hub, can you explain more about that?
We’re calling it ‘The Invisible City’ and its focusing upon the King Cross where there’s been a big regeneration programme and people have been recording those changes in various ways with photography,radio and film.
So we’re looking at the area specifically, but we’re looking more generally at the way we look to describe urban life…we’re bringing together film, photography and radio which is the other distinguishing feature about the festival this year in that we’re looking at ‘documentary’ in the wider sense of the word now and seeing how documentary narratives are being produced in all these different types of media.
Do you organise any events beyond the sixteen days of the festival?
Yes, I think it’s quite important that the festival is a highlight of the year for us because we do work all year around.
We do a monthly Docspot screening at the Barbican… and we do work in Pakistan, so we’re quite heavily engaged in other activities.
Are there any films this year that you’re particularly looking forward to?
A big one is by Abel Ferrara which is already sold out. We’ve got a French film about music in China, it’s very experimental…There films which are quite inspiring stories about people who have taken things into their own hands.
