Documentaries are like time machines and spaceships, transporting audiences to unknown, exotic, friendly, eccentric or terrifying worlds through the experiences they create.

An international documentary festival has a double effect on its audience; within its movie theatres it contains the universal world of documentary but on the streets there is a physical universality created by the presence of guests from all over the world. For the traveller each new adventure created by a film is another motive based on the main theme.

It can be the story of the Far East, the peculiar spicy culture of India or the calm landscapes of the old Europe; the rapid rhythm of fluttering fabrics, or the memories of a cold prison. Good documentaries report to us from far away and tell about the ‘different’. Yet there are always happy coincidences, like when guests meet the familiar in an unguarded moment. As is the case with me, recognizing familiar faces and languages during a screening in the freezing cold Netherlands: Kurdish children on the way to school.

In many senses the so-called “universal experience” consists of finding familiarity in the unfamiliar – a face or a sound, maybe a gesture, a touch or a look. But it comes in many forms, and as a surprise it sometimes appears on the face of the unknown. That’s the magic of international festivals: Meeting the same familiarity, whether it is from a camera placed in a faraway country or in your hometown, that is universal humanity itself.

Evrim Kaya