When I start to write these lines, I am on a train that takes me to Olomouc, in Czech Republic. We've left Prague and we are crossing a lush forest landscape coloured by various shades of green. At the same time, you can sense those yellowish tones that are so typical in summer. It is still June, but it is arid and heavy, inland. As far as we are from the sea and its temperate nature.
In Olomouc, I will watch ten documentaries that participate in the Dok.Incubator program. These are films that are in transit, just at that moment where they have stopped being an idea on a piece of paper and hours of filmed material to become a creature with a name and a surname. Films that are being cooked in the editing room and that are looking for their personality and their reason for being. Films that are looking for their place in the world. It is that crucial moment when finding a landscape and the story behind becomes the main task of the filmmaker, knowing that this landscape can be a mountain, a photograph or just a face and that it will become the vanishing point of the whole film or what Susan Sontag called the "punctum". What, later, will have the ability to fascinate viewers
A few days ago, Facebook reminded me of a post I wrote in 2015. In it I asked: "Films with punctum, where are you?". To be honest, I didn't remember writing it, but I do recognize my avid desire to be caught up in cinema and, also, its warning because this is a desire we must take care of due to that accumulation of hours of viewing often has the opposite effect of dampening it. The balance between watching and not watching is, then, crucial in the life of any programmer. Only then can we be fully able to let ourselves be caught by the landscapes and stories that cinema has placed at the centre of the screen.
Anna Petrus
