About the organization
Bidayyat for Audiovisual Arts is a non-profit civil company, launched in early 2013, to support and produce documentaries and short and experimental films, and to organize specialized training courses on documentary filmmaking.We live today in an age in which the experience of the region has been recoupled to history, has diversified and fragmented, an age in which the peolple have barely begun to reacquaint themselves with their geographical, social and human topography. This is where Bidayyat comes in, an organization from the non-mainstream arts scene, preoccupied by troubling questions concerning the field of documentary filmmaking and uninterested in assumptions and pattern answers.It is no longer enough to claim to be objectively documenting reality and conveying it meticulously and professionally to your audience; now, anyone who wishes to make documentary films is obliged to have a viewpoint; to interrogate their relationship with reality in an effort to invoke that reality from their own perspective. They must have something complex to say, someone to say it to, and they must know the most appropriate artistic form in which to say it.In documentary filmmaking the only objectivity is that which takes the director’s presence and perspective into account. Objectivity means being aware that truth lies in a plurality of perspectives and their compatibility. Objectivity is respecting the characters in the film, their stories and their personal concerns. Objectivity is located in integrity, in the narrative’s aesthetic, in the power of the dramatic structure and in the coherence of the artistic vision. The story remains incomplete without the presence of the director, without a treatment that locates the work in time and place, without manipulation of sound and picture, without intensive work on the composition and editing. The story remains incomplete if the audience cannot play a role, is not free to read and interpret documentary films unhindered by prescriptive and patronising advice.