7 PLANS 7 is DocsBarcelona’s annual invitation to a leading figure from the documentary world who, by choosing 7 shots or sequences from their career, opens a debate on audiovisual language. Seven shots of the invisible: ‘We documentary makers know very well that our search for images of the real often runs into impenetrable barriers marking the line between the visible and the invisible. Very occasionally, material from that dark side of things, where the filmmaker’s camera is obviously forbidden, unexpectedly falls into the public domain. For filmmakers, that is a unique and privileged moment. That is how my colleague and friend Luc Côté and I felt when, in July 2008, we were able to see for the first time a video captured by a security camera in an interrogation cell at Guantánamo prison. We owe this to the Supreme Court of Canada which, granting the request of Omar Khadr’s Canadian lawyers, ordered the country’s secret police to release an interrogation its agents carried out with Khadr in 2003, when he was only 16. We knew at once that we had to take on the challenge of turning these shots, captured with no artistic intention whatsoever, into a piece of cinema. Because despite their appalling technical quality, this material has the supreme value of revealing part of the invisible in a place tragically famous for its darkness.’ Patricio Henríquez
