There is a whole journey between the idea for a film and the final film. How one covers that distance, how one approaches the “translation” of that first “inner image”, as Dutch documentary filmmaker Johan van der Keuken called it, into a concrete work, is different for every filmmaker. Yet time and again, the classic screenplay is declared the holy grail of filmmaking, preached by script doctors and disseminated through manuals. Why? In the first place because it is the most convenient key to financing and control. All too often, however, it results in standardised and uninspired cinema.

As part of the 50th Film Fest Ghent, Sabzian sat down with a number of filmmakers who use other forms of writing. How did they arrive at their way of working and what impact does it have on their production and financing? The name ‘Anti-Manual’ is borrowed from issue 710 of the Cahiers du Cinéma, which was dedicated to the dogma of the screenplay in the film industry: “A scenario anti-manual: to point out the ideology of manuals, to deconstruct it and, above all, to propose an alternative. An anti-manual, too, because this collection goes against the very idea of a manual: there is no ‘you must’ or ‘we have to’ here. The question is: ‘What can we do?’”

With Bas Devos, Radu Jude, Alexandre Koberidze and Helena Wittmann
Moderated by Gerard-Jan Claes and Nina de Vroome