With less than a month to go until the 2025 Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles, and in the context of World Cinema Day on 8 February, Paola Lagos Labbé reflects on the documentary genre in a year where two out of the five nominated films address current war conflicts, two focus on abuse cases, and one is set during the Cold War. “The documentary has always been a more politically engaged space than other genres, given its inherent relationship with reality, and this allows for much more critical discourse,” she explains.

One of the documentaries nominated for Best Feature Documentary is No Other Land, a first-person account of the Israeli occupation of a village in the West Bank from the perspective of a young Palestinian. “The fact that a film like this is featured in such a mainstream, hegemonic event as the Oscars is a very significant political gesture,” the lecturer states.

“Documentaries are committed to dismantling power structures, and the Oscars stage has been intelligently used for that purpose. I think of Michael Moore’s speech when he received his Oscar for Bowling for Columbine—when they had to cut his microphone because he began speaking out against the Iraq War, pointing directly at former President George Bush,” Lagos Labbé continues.

In addition to the genre’s inherent critical nature, the lecturer highlights another common thread among three of this year’s nominated films: subjectivity. “No Other Land, Black Box Diaries and Sugarcane are all made from first-hand accounts of people who have been directly affected by the realities they portray,” she explains. “This approach, which was once more at home in alternative and independent cinema, has now firmly found a place in industrial filmmaking,” she adds.

The lecturer goes on to discuss the emotional shift in these films. “In the Japanese film Black Box Diaries, the protagonist’s privacy is violated by an abuse case, and her struggle results in transformations within the country’s justice system. We see how the first-person perspective doesn’t remain narcissistic but transcends into a universal conversation, balancing the intimate, the historical, and the political,” she explains. “The same is true in No Other Land, where the protagonist takes on the role of the camera as a tool for denouncing and exposing the violations faced by his people,” she continues. According to the expert, this embodied subjectivity offers viewers “a completely different perspective on the cinematic experience.”

“Issues like political and environmental activism, gender equality, armed conflicts, and historical revisionism have always been present in documentary filmmaking,” she notes, expressing optimism about the future of the genre. “The documentary still has much to say, especially in the urgent context we’re living in. I wish it a long and healthy life,” she concludes.

However, documentary filmmaking is not immune to the impact of new technologies and the rise of artificial intelligence. “A weeks-long editing process where an editor organises and cuts two years’ worth of footage can now be done by a programme in just minutes. I’m concerned about the precariousness of documentary-related professions, which, in general, lack substantial resources”, concludes the expert. Nevertheless, for Paola Lagos, the unique perspective and complexity of the human condition remains “irreplaceable.”

As a lecturer at the University, Paola asserts that “at UIC Barcelona, we strive to offer a comprehensive and critical perspective that reflects on the issues of contemporary reality, with documentary filmmaking being a powerful creative and ethical tool to transform it.”