The 14th Addis International Film Festival (AIFF) was opened on December, 16, 2020 at Vamdas Entertainment. The festival will end today Sunday, December 20.

This year AIFF meticulously handpicked award winning documentaries on human right and other social and cultural issues affecting the world. 25 short and long contemporary documentaries such as AlphaGo, Social Dilemma, American Factory and others were screened at Hager Fiker Theatre and Hyatt Regency Hotel from December 17 to 19 for free.

The festival invited a guest from Belgium, MichielRoberrech to lead a workshop about a hybrid documentary at Hyatt Regency. Michael Roberrech is a film director, writer and photographer. He started as a writer by writing and directing his first movie Peer Gynt in 2018. He is currently working on a documentary and a fiction entitled the Million in Eritrea and a short film entitled Les Aveugles. Les Aveugles which is about blind people living in an island in Atlantic Ocean and they think they are surrounded by a big monster that doesn’t want them to leave the island. He will also be releasing a film entitled “The Floating Land” sometime this year.

The workshop was followed by screening a documentary entitled Close-Up. Close-Up is an hour and 38 minutes documentary about a poor man who is driven by his passion for film, he impersonates a famous film director and enters into a rich family and con them into giving him money. He was later discovered and put on a trial.

After the screening, Michiel talked about the difference between documentary and fiction. He said, “the difference between documentary and fiction is non-existent. Once the camera starts rolling people change the way they act and behave which makes it hard to capture what really happened authentically.”