MASTERCLASS

Current affairs have long been a staple of investigative journalism, as well as investigative documentary. With the emergence of fake news, the need for this genre grew, which was never just for television, but also a successful festival film material, with not only informational but also cinematic, artistic and production value. Not infrequently, some of the well-known, “fundamental”, current documentary films would gain their visibility precisely through festival awards (e.g. The Imposter – Sundance Film Festival), or even Oscar nominations (Navalny, Zero days, An Inconvenient truth), so they would be shown on television channels broadcast only as an award-winning film. That is why projects like the British Bellingcats, which have an ever-growing audience, are not surprising.

However, when it comes to production in the area of the former Yugoslavia, but also in the greater part of Eastern post-communist Europe, it seems that current affairs do not have their own space. Public televisions almost never produce such contents themselves, and they avoid accepting them in the form of production or co-production, that is, possible purchase of the rights, even in tenders. Moreover, even when the authors and the production nevertheless manage to produce such a documentary and provoke a reaction from the public, the same television stations avoid broadcasting the film in their program. At the same time, festival program selectors give their programming focus and priority to the so-called creative documentary, so the authors of the current genre have less and less distribution space for showing their investigative films.

Almost twenty years of such a trend has led to an increasingly weak motivation of authors to engage in the research of current affairs with a documentary film. With only a few very important and significant exceptions in the region, documentary titles of this genre are a real rarity.

Unappreciated by the film industry, thinned out from festival selections, exiled from public television, what perspective do current affairs have and what motivation is offered to authors to deal with this genre today