ZINEBI – International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao, organised by Bilbao Town Hall, is to award its first Mikeldi of Honour Award at the 65th festival to Frederick Wiseman (Boston, Massachusetts, USA, 1930) for his decisive contribution to the definition of what most of us understand as cinematographic documentaries, specifically within the realms of observational documentary.

At the age of almost 94, his impressive list of films (almost 50 feature films, shorts and several episodes for the renowned PBS documentary series Independent Lens) has rightly bestowed upon him the aura of a legendary director, able to show in each new documentary the same intuition he demonstrated in the seminal Titicut Follies (1967), portraying the lives of the inmates of a psychiatric prison in Massachusetts, viewed by an audience which even today is impacted by the reality recorded on Wiseman’s “invisible” camera. This maiden feature film – followed by Law and Order (1969), Juvenile Court (1973), Meat (1976) and Near Death (1989), among many others – is the best exponent of a work that served to extend the Utopian objective of direct cinema to transform the footage and sounds of films into something that those watching the films would be able to see and hear if they were present in the shooting location at the time.

Wiseman, however, distanced himself from his predecessors and contemporaries (D. A. Pennebaker, British director Richard Leacock and the Maysles brothers), claiming that all his films are tinged with the subjectivity inherent to any cinematographic decision. His versatility as a director was also obvious, from the new perspective of the introduction of the utilisation of video, in many of his documentaries filmed in the 21st century, often applied to the painstaking description of rites, processes, customs of society or the daily functioning of institutions in the United States: State Legislature (2007), At Berkeley (2013), National Gallery (2014), Ex Libris (2017) or Monrovia, Indiana (2018).

A CAREER ACCLAIMED WORLDWIDE

With this kind of film trajectory under his belt, it need hardly be said that the director has notched up a large number of awards: in 2016 he won an honorary Oscar for his entire career, and his accomplishments have also been acclaimed at Cannes, Venice, Turin and Jihlava, and many years ago he also took honorary awards from the IDA (International Documentary Association), the American Society of Cinematographers, and also from Los Angeles and New York film critic associations.

In view of the magnitude of the artistic legacy of an oeuvre that constitutes an enormous cinematographic fresco of US society since the last third of the 20th century up to the present day (the very recent City Hall (2020) had its State premiere at ZINEBI 62, and was declared best film of the year by French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma), the International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao is settling up a debt outstanding to the greatest living documentary filmmaker with the 2023 Honorary Mikeldi Award.

PREMIERE SCREENING OF HIS LATEST DOCUMENTARY

Wiseman, who is due to collect his Mikeldi of Honour Award at the Arriaga Theatre on 10 November during the ZINEBI opening ceremony, will be screening his most recent production for the first time in the State in the documentary section Beautiful Docs. An Overview of Documentaries from Over the World: Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023), the world premiere of which was staged in Venice just over a month ago.

On this occasion, Wiseman again makes his presence invisible to take viewers through a fantastic demonstration of the daily round of one of France’s most renowned haute cuisine dynasties, the owner of three restaurants. One of which, the Troisgros, opened 93 years ago, and has boasted three Michelin stars for 55 years.

It will be screened at Bilbao’s Golem Alhóndiga cinemas on 11 and 16 November.