Doc Edge, New Zealand’s very own Academy Awards qualifying international documentary festival opens next week. After pressure from activists two years ago, the festival removed the Israeli Embassy from its Partners page. Unfortunately, old habits die hard and it has still found space in its 2024 programme for We Will Dance Again, a documentary about the events of 7 October, made to justify Israel’s actions in the months since then. One may wonder whether there is something specific about this particular festival that makes it amenable to reactionary programming. However, while Doc Edge is certainly a glaring case of Zionist film programming, it isn’t exceptional in this regard.

Contrary to the picture painted by its title, We Will Dance Again is a real film, not simply a threat. The documentary was hastily assembled in the months since Israel started its ramped-up genocide in Gaza to provide cover for the violence. The BBC even got involved in its production to launder its own reputation after accusations that it was insufficiently deferential to Israel. The film hones in on the Hamas attack on Nova Music Festival, the event which supposedly kicked-off the gut-wrenching violence that has been filling our social media feeds in the months since.

*Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) in her own chill out zone outside Auschwitz in Zone of Interest*

When one pictures the dreadlocked festival goers dancing to EDM next to an open-air prison, they might envisage some historical precedents. Perhaps it brings to mind the Nazi family going about its life next to Auschwitz in Zone of Interest (director Jonathan Glazer has made no secret of the parallels he sees) or the scenes of Juliane Köhler’s Eva Braun dancing the night away while Berlin disintegrates around her in Downfall. Hippies getting down to bad music in the occupied Negev desert could even be an ironic montage from an Adam Curtis film. However, the world of the film is one where that Hasbara mantra “there was a ceasefire before October 7” is true. The copy on the Doc Edge website even includes the line “Terror breached the border fence and unleashed violence on the unsuspecting people,” not for a second considering the fact that the very existence of that fence belies the fact that violence long preceded the festival, whether or not the Eurotrash festival-goers dared to acknowledge it.

*Bloodthirsty messages from the We Will Dance Again exhibition in New York*

It was 2022 when Doc Edge last faced significant pushback for its chummy embrace of Israel (not that it was the first time). This was the year where it was forced to contend with the funding it received from apartheid Israel and its reluctance to screen films by Palestinians. Faced with massive pushback from filmmakers, it quietly removed the Israeli Embassy from its ‘Partners’ page and has even started screening Palestinian films. So does this mean that Doc Edge has seen the error of its ways? Not quite.

The ‘Values and Principles’ page uses a sheen of Te Reo Māori and corporate jargon to obscure an immature belligerence underlying the organisation. The following section makes it clear that the festival is pre-empting pushback (like this article I suppose) for its pro-genocide programming decisions.

The same can be said about its curation principles (would any serious critic argue that We Will Dance Again meets the ‘Quality’ and ‘Ethics’ principles?) and its policy on accepting support from embassies and foreign governments. This approach of bristling against any criticism seems to be baked into the DNA of the festival. Founder Dan Shanan (who is Israeli) aligned himself with hard-right astroturf group the Free Speech Union when pushing back on criticism in 2022 and Chair Glenn Johnstone said the following when criticised in 2018: "(The festival) will not bow to pressure groups who seek to censor content on the basis that a film takes a point of view with which that group disagrees."

It might seem odd that “the premiere documentary festival in Australasia” has a habit of getting defensive when it is called out for laundering propaganda in the service of apartheid and genocide. Unfortunately, this is a feature rather than a bug for the art form. Documentary has a reputation for being somehow more ‘real’ than narrative film (think of how the NZIFF brands its documentary programme as “Framing reality”). This makes the artform ideal as a tool for propaganda with some of the most celebrated films in recent years using documentary in the service of empire.

*In a post-Fargo world, audiences should know that just because a film tells you that it’s true, doesn’t mean you have to take it literally*

The minute you pick up a camera and film something, you’re mediating reality, whether or not you have a script. Once you’ve thrown editing and score and voiceover into the mix, you’re left with something no more inherently ‘real’ than The Blair Witch Project. I adore documentary and many of the films I love have shitty politics but the idea that the artform is more ‘real’ just because of the filmmaking process and style is an insidious one.

I frequently think about Werner Herzog’s concept of ‘ecstatic truth’. This is a filmmaker whose narrative films contain a ton of documentary elements and whose documentary films contain playful fictions in the service of a greater truth. Herzog’s Minnesota declaration begins with the following lesson: “the so-called Cinema Verité¹ is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.” I think this point of view is instructive when considering whether We Will Dance Again contains any great truths outside a call to genocide repeated without context by a proudly reactionary organisation like Doc Edge.

Jimmy Lanyard is a writer, unionist and cinephile from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. While he is primarily interested in film, he also occasionally writes about history, the public sector and animal psychology.

DocEdge and the Lie of Objective Filmmaking