“One of the key topics, for me, is a study of the individual in relation to crowds and to power. A film essay on crowd psychology would avoid commentary (it has become the madness of secondary discourse in many documentaries) and rely wholly on sound and image. Ideally, it would try to provide us with new concepts on the nature of society, on violence, and on the political bestiality of our times that is linked to the way the media has become a plague of words and images stripped of substance. It is a plague infecting our lives and, as a consequence, the history of nations with all that is sensational, random, and confused.”

On key topics in the documentary genre, Sundance Channel Interview (July 2004)

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Damian Pettigrew 16
Canadian filmmaker

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