2009 – 2018: New writings from the four corners of the Earth
2009: New festival director Javier Packer-Comyn expands the programme, offering a clever mix of loyalty to the festival’s fundamentals, a look back at the history of the documentary genre and openness to more experimental forms. The competition bears witness to the evolution of documentary cinema and its inspirations in the visual arts.
2010: Creation of a “First films” section (previously undifferentiated) which introduces us to Mati Diop and Dieudo Hamadi that year, among others.
2012: Creation of a new section : “Arrested Cinema”, cinema banned by repressive powers, starting with Syria. The Grand Prix goes to Autrement la Molussie by Nicolas Rey, an experimental film shot on out-of-date 16 mm film, with the order of projection of the reels arbitrarily fixed for each screening.
2013: 35th festival. Arrival of a new artistic director, Maria Bonsanti, from Florence’s Festival dei Popoli.
2014: Creation of ParisDOC, the festival’s professional section : expanded conferences around film distribution, with two days of “Work in Progress” screenings in particular, strictly for professionals.
2016: The Centre National des Arts Plastiques becomes a partner of the festival. It provides additional grants for the Joris Ivens Award, created on the initiative of Marceline Loridan and Capi Films, and awarded to a first film.
2018: 40th edition. The Bpi and Les Amis du Cinéma du réel call on a new artistic director, Andrea Picard, programmer of the most avant-garde section of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The Grand Prix goes to radical American filmmaker James Benning for L. Cohen, a long still-shot of an Oregon desert landscape.