In today’s entertainment industry, actors are not divided by the medium in which they perform. It has become increasingly common to see theatre, cinema, and TV actors crossing over into each other’s domains. While the mediums of theatre, cinema, and TV differ greatly in terms of their physicality and the scale of audience they cater to, one aspect that unites these mediums is their ability to evoke emotions in their viewers. Theater, cinema, and television are all arts forms involving actors that reflect on our lives, society and existence. The stories of suffering protagonists and character journeys explore strong emotions from hellish sadness to heavenly happiness, impact not only the characters on screen but also the lives of the viewers, and as we shall see, inspire directors.
Through the six selected documentaries, we are confronted with different directorial visions looking at how theatre, cinema and television affect the auteurs’ lives and those around them.
This impact can be felt whether it’s through the search for a lost film, the memory of a father who worked in the theatre, actors who find themselves while performing the tragedy of Iphigenia, or of a poet harassed because of his performance, of a collector in Arabia trying to restore a bygone era or simply the memory of television images.
The documentarians take their cameras and search into the past in order to find an identity or a memory that will make the present more bearable and understandable. And so, the archive material found in these works takes on another dimension, becoming modern, speaking to today’s lives, contributing to the reconstitution of memory with exemplary liveliness, making sense of today by looking into yesterday.