At a time of a global crisis spanning all areas of life, artistic and cultural creativity tends to be pushed out to the periphery of public attention as non-essential. We at the National Library, a center of culture, inspiration, and knowledge, are working to preserve and nurture these areas, being certain that they are deeply essential, and that the COVID crisis cannot blunt the need and the desire for experiences, learning, emotion, amazement, and inspiration.

This year like in the past years, we are holding the Docu.Text festival. As the ability to meet you in the Library’s viewing spaces is denied us, we are glad to come to your screens at home in a digital version of the festival which includes the best documentary cinema created in the past year and having to do with heritage, identity, and memory.

This year’s program includes new films on writers who have affected minds and societies, such as Margaret Atwood in the film Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power, Ursula K. Le Guin in Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, Elena Ferrante in Ferrante Fever, as well as one of our own, the writer Dvora Omer, whose childhood characters have become part of the Israeli mindset, in Rain in Her Eyes.

The world has become a seething cauldron with social struggles taking place everywhere: the UK, Argentina, Chile, the US, Thailand, Hong Kong, Belarus, Lebanon, Iran, and here in Israeli society. Our program this year features several films on protest movements, such as Four Mothers, White Riot, In the Intense Now, the Agnès Varda shorts program including Black Panthers and Salut les Cubains, and more.

In addition to the films, we will host meetings and conversations. How to document social protests? Who is documented and who is left out? How do scholars and researchers decipher archival materials in later years, and what is our role as the National Library, a body tasked with preserving and making available these materials?

We invite you to watch the films and then take part in live encounters with their creators, as well as scholars and artists, and to tour the Library’s collections. We hope you enjoy the experience.

Docu.Text is held in collaboration with the Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival, and we thank our partner in this endeavor.