We are currently witnessing a profound revolution in the way we relate to image technologies — one comparable to the birth of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century or to the popularization of television and video in the second. As with earlier revolutions, the way we construct our personal and social narratives has been deeply shaken: in fact, it is increasingly through digital technologies that we build our mirror image, our sense of place, our very individuality — whether through what we make public or through the archiving of our private lives.

This ongoing revolution has two interconnected dimensions: on the side of consumption, we are witnessing the exponential multiplication of screens and media sources; on the side of production, we see a proliferation of recording, surveillance, and memory devices. Both tendencies raise suspicion: we hear about information overload, of the trivialization and frivolity of images, and of the looming threat of a generalized panoptic system. Yet information can be filtered, and the panopticon can also offer an entirely new experiential field — including in the arts. In the panoptic era, a unique opportunity arises for the aestheticization of life and experience.

Inevitably, such an inflection cannot fail to undermine a certain asceticism of cinema, its languages, and its institutions. The videographic medium has long ceased to be marginalized by its functionalist status; it has become one of the emblematic supports of artistic postmodernity. Screens have spread through exhibition spaces, founding new modalities of art and becoming technological sculptures in their own right. Even the most unassuming uses of these devices — with the amateur and voyeuristic style of so-called home videos — are continually appropriated and integrated into academic cinema, re-educating it.

Above all, new ways of telling stories have emerged — new gazes, new accesses to domains historically out of reach. One such domain, perhaps the most unsuspected of all, is the family — understood here not so much as a thematic zone, but as a metaphor for intimacy. The family delineates the ultimate frontier of the private: it extends beyond sexuality and individuality and can even expand to take the form of a community, yet it always retains an aura of interdiction, a boundary against otherness and publicity. Hence, perhaps, its enduring fascination. On the one hand, we find its sacred force, its power to decree identity and ownership; on the other, we see its inherent erogeny, a tacit invitation to the voyeuristic gaze of those who do not belong to the same domus. The erogenous, then, lies in the confrontation with another’s intimacy; and intimacy, in its broadest sense, converges with the idea of family.

It is precisely this space of intimacy that is now being continuously transgressed from within by the flood of new digital devices and networks. It is not exactly a matter of warning here against the negligent permissiveness of contemporary societies, much less against a dystopian scenario of bankruptcy of intimacy. Intimacy will always find its place, even if it must remain in constant motion. What is at stake is to tread that line between public and private, between otherness and identity. It is precisely this tense space — today governed by a vast technological panoticotopy — that we seek to observe and to highlight. But we must do so without allowing our gaze to destroy the scene it contemplates. Such a gaze, so delicate and respectful, can only be an aesthetic one.

Within this panorama, the Family Film Project emerges as a film festival focused on the frontier between public and private, between popular and intimate, between global and local, but also between mainstream and alternative, between the dominant and the precarious, or even between the performative (usually more associated with invented words) and the documentary register (which tends to be more directly associated with the real). By positioning itself along this vast dividing line, the Family Film Project seeks to find points of contact and superposition, yet without surrendering to any side, without becoming politicized. The path it wishes to follow is not that of conflict, nor that of theoretical inquiry. It is not, for example, about rethinking the threshold between documentary and fiction, or the status of independent and amateur productions in relation to popular cinema and the blockbuster. Nor is it about reclaiming the values of privacy or family, much less electing them as explicit themes. The aim of this festival remains slightly withdrawn from such objects and discussions, even as it involves and evokes them. It seeks instead to give space to that fertile zone, increasingly fertile, where life merges with its own record, where the real is also performative and performance also real, where the most intimate experience may become visible without losing its intimacy.

Filipe Martins (September 2014)