Having been at IDFA for the last couple of days brings a question to my mind: Why do I watch documentaries? To learn easily about certain subjects, explore different forms of reality, or get one step closer to the truth?

Documentaries…The visual history of humanity. They teach me what ideas and faith mean to people in different times and spaces, and witness how politics manipulate faith and abuses people’s consciences. As the festival continues, the films gain different meanings; they become tools to understand life. We realize how people can think and live differently over time, and how to find new keys to open doors through different stories.

There are political statements in some documentaries; filmmakers get disturbed by an issue and believe that it has to be known more by people in order for things to change, so they tell us a story to open up a new window into our way of thinking. Other documentaries show us what it’s like to be from another country, they take us to places that we may not have a chance to go to physically. They fly us from an Indian neighbourhood to a city park in Boston. One minute we can feel a person’s sorrow, the next we can analyze the challenges of poverty.

To learn, get inspired or simply for enjoyment, I love documentaries! It is cold outside in Amsterdam, but inside there’s a vast and deep world waiting to be discovered.

Selma Şevkli