According to Werner Herzog mere facts constitute an accountant’s reality, but it is the ecstatic truth (a poetic reality) that can capture more faithfully the nuances and depths of human experiences. Given that animation (or manipulated moving image) has the freedom to represent, stylize, or reimagine the world, it lends itself well to this aspirational form of a documentary. We invite speakers to respond to the idea of “Ecstatic Truth” and reflect, speculate and imagine how animated (or manipulated image) form might elicit the different facets of this poetic truth, through its unique language. We welcome speculations, poetic reflections, rigorous questioning, even fierce creative opposition to Herzog’s statement… 

We want to explore questions of “truth” in an age where hierarchy of authority is challenged by social media’s ability to give everyone an equal voice. How can an expanded form of documentary, which pushes the fluid boundaries between fact and fiction, subjective and objective, poetic and informative, help us understand the world we live in? And in this tangle of impressions, where lies the deeper, poetic, or “ecstatic” truth, and how can this truth help us navigate the ever more complex landscape of information overload? We welcome work that challenges, provokes, questions the complex relationship between the reality we all share, and the inner worlds shaped by our own hopes, desires, prejudices, illusions, memories, perceptions and dreams….

Ecstatic Truth is a one-day symposium that will explore provocative approaches to the factual – from the poetic, personal and autobiographical through to ‘objective’ documentary – through animated filmmaking. Animation is considered in an expanded form, as a spectrum of activities from traditional character animation to experimental manipulated moving image; from the screen-based – short film – to the spatialised – VR and installation.