Documentary cinema often defines itself by expressing what already happened or that which is ongoing; similar to how the camera can only capture images that immediately become a record of the past. The Future Tense focus program presents an engagement with the rarer creative documentary practice. It showcases artists who find a way to divine, conjure, and complicate glimpses of the future within and through the cinematic image.

Three directors with work presented in the program—Kidlat Tahimik, Viera Čákanyová, and Miko Revereza—come together to discuss their approach to filmmaking, and how for each of them uniquely, the faculty of vision has transformed into a tool of the visionary.

This conversation, moderated by the program curator Sarah Dawson, will explore the difference in the methods of making the films that report and record, versus those that imagine and intuit. How to shift cinematic perspective from leaning back into posterity, to forward into hope, warning, or speculation? Can the medium of documentary allow present images to reveal possible futures? And what do these envisioned futures reflect about where we are now?