FIDOCS

If you’re not familiar with it, the Festival Internacional de Documental de Santiago (no worries, you can call it FIDOCS) is a non-fiction film festival which has been the main venue, vehicle and competition for the most important nonfiction cinema in  Chile and Latin America. Pushed by some of the most brilliant people in documentary film, it works to promote dialogue, reflection, and formation of audiences around documentary world cinema in the broad sense. The festival seeks to represent not only the status of documentary work today, but to question the very nature of the documentary. The festival programme always explores the various and multiple paths of documentary film and the line between reality and fiction.  The festival  selects movies, short films, installations, and works where the question of “What is real?” plays with  different genres and breaks disciplinary borders.

As we were approached by the direction of the festival and asked to create a new identity, our goals were then clear: represent the festival’s vision and its attention to a constantly shapeshifting art form and reality, positioning it in the league of international festivals, and create a new identity for an institution that has been around for over a decade and beloved by its audience.  

The visual concept had to evoke the action of understanding reality, be aware, and keep your eyes open in a simple, delicate, and yet straightforward way. We were asked to design the image of that year’s edition alone, but we felt we had to go beyond that task and create a new bold symbol for the festival, one that could end up being a hallmark for that and future editions (as it did). The iconic figure reminds the viewer of the eye, of a human, of a projection. It’s the core of an identity that unfolded into diverse medias – online and offline – from digital applications to catalogs, books, wayfinding and campaigns. What is more real than that?