Concrete Playground

Documentary film, reckon Antenna founders David Rokach and Alejandra Canales, is a robust and awesome genre. As such they've lined up a selection of documentary films long and short, by directors emerging and established, and put them together in a four-day celebration and investigation of this mode of filmmaking and what it can tell us about our world and our lives. This is the first time the festival has run, and it's the first Australian film festival to let non-fiction take the front seat in all its creepy, quirky, devastatingly revelatory and endearingly weird glory.

It's also hosting the inaugural Walkley Documentary Award , which is kind of an exciting thing to exist, and has a dedicated Young People Program in the interactive Doc_Next program, a move toward engagement with the bright young things that seems honestly set to work with and learn from the different ways in which a new generation understands and makes media. We are all documenting all the time now, in ways that are ever more readily mass-communicable, and this festival is both a state of the nation on what documentary is and does now and a space for consideration of what it can be and do in the future.