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Film at Lincoln Center presents the eighth edition of Art of the Real, the essential showcase for vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking, from November 19-21. The 2021 slate features a vibrant collection of works by acclaimed filmmakers from around the world. Aptly subtitled “Counter Encounters,” this year’s Art of the Real presents one feature and 41 shorts, and encompasses works by historical and contemporary filmmakers, artists, collectives, and communities. Their practices not only disturb classical ethnographic paradigms, but also reinvent an art of the real in itself.
Counter Encounters is a cinephilic letter to ethnography, one of rupture and reignition, inviting consideration by everyone interested in building visual cultures of mutual recognition. Almost since its inception, ethnography has reckoned with its own complicated foundations, among them its roots in colonialism, and the imbalanced and troubled relations inherent in a one-sided narrative of encounter. Through this self-reflection and reinvention, new forms of cinema have been devised by ethnographers and artists, which have helped to question and reinvent the languages representing alterity.