It was one of many films based on the “archive,” on recuperating a figure damaged by and lost to history through the use of photographs and home movies-in this case a family friend who suddenly disappeared after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The most important film of the festival was Pegah Ahangarani’s I Am Trying to Remember, a sixteen-minute film buried in a shorts program screened late at night, early in the festival. If the “Post Reality” created by COVID (the name of one of the festival strands) could date so quickly, what of documentaries based on archival discovery and found footage that continue to dominate the genre? The scheduled glut of films dealing with or filmed during the COVID pandemic-including the opening film How to Survive a Pandemic (David France)-suddenly seemed dated, despite the coronavirus continuing to be a live issue. With Russia invading Ukraine less than three weeks before the festival started, the mood inevitably turned somber. There were few banner names in the program-Lucretia Martel with her short North Terminal Ramin Bahrani’s first documentary, 2nd Chance, confirmed his decline from promising auteur to anonymous professional neither filmmaker was to be in attendance. The twenty-fourth Thessaloniki Documentary Festival was already going to be a low-key affair.
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