Daniel Ribas was born and lives in Porto. He is an assistant professor of cinema at the School of Arts of the Portuguese Catholic University and deputy director of CITAR – Center for Research in Science and Technology of the Arts. He is a film programmer at Porto/Post/Doc and Curtas Vila do Conde festivals. PhD in Cultural Studies from the Universities of Aveiro and Minho, he wrote several articles and book chapters on contemporary Portuguese cinema, experimental cinema and documentary. He was editor of the books Puro Cinema: Curtas Vila do Conde 20 Anos Depois and Agência: Uma Década em Curtas. He recently published A Dramatugy of Violence: The Films of João Canijo (2018).

Hybrid Films: How Non-Fiction is Changing Contemporary Cinema

One of the most important issues on the ontology of cinema – the question of real – reappeared in the latest arenas of film festivals and scholarship. On the one hand, the very idea of a fast world, in which the real and fake are part of the same coin, demanded to think slow and to blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. We do know that this is an eternal question, lifted even by the “first” documentary filmmaker, Robert Flaherty. However, 21st century cinema deepens the problem arised by Flaherty: it’s not what is the real, but in which conditions can we reveal the contradictions of that very real. A lot of films and filmmakers, especially in the area of the non-fiction, started to play with these concepts, creating complex works of blends of stories and myths, actors and non-actors, in a performative environment. We shall discuss this trend looking to films as Letters to Max, by Eric Baudelaire; The Human Surge, by Eduardo Williams; El Mar La Mar, by Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki; or Cocote, by Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias.