6pm – Welcome party
Join the festival team as we celebrate the opening of the first Folkestone Documentary Festival. DJ Helga de Fonseca Shaw will curate a ‘Summer of Soul’ inspired set and there will be some delicious nibbles to enjoy.
7pm – Keynote Speech by Elhum Shakerifar
Documentary producer Elhum Shakerifar is one of the most innovative and thoughtful filmmakers in UK documentary culture. In this keynote talk, she’ll reflect on the documentary stories she loves to show how filmmakers are entwined in the stories they tell. The talk explores how places like Folkestone should see themselves as centers, not margins.
Tickets: Included in ticket for opening night film The Story of Looking.
This keynote will also be live-streamed on the Creative Folkestone YouTube Channel.
7.45pm – Opening night film The Story of Looking
As he prepares for surgery to restore his vision, Mark Cousins explores the role that visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visible world, a kaleidoscope of extraordinary imagery across cultures and eras. At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of the human experience, empathy, discovery, and thought. He shares the pleasure and pain of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. As the Covid-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to the other lookers for their vision from lockdown and travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.
