Even at a moment such as the present, at which most of the elements that make it up seem to converge on its most positive areas - public interest, the fact that social processes become visible, democratisation of the means of production, need to counteract the mechanisms of uniformalisation of the world through views which are far removed from the stipulated consensuses on reality.-, even at a moment such as this, the genre of documentary cinema finds its natural setting on the small screen.

At the cinema, and outside the programming of festivals such as this, few documentaries gain their first showing and in general they are productions that are forced to give up part of their language to the market. Thus MiradasDoc has decided this year to consider the possibility of investigating this matter which it deals with, it is true, from a more professional than amateur position, a very current range of considerations including vitality and the specificity of a cinematic genre which only exceptionally manages to edit for sale on DVD. The questions on which we wish to place emphasis - and regarding which we are not looking so much for a response as a common reflection - are the following: Can it be said that the documentary is a genre which is more suited to television that to cinema? What are the characteristics of a documentary that is made for television? What differentiates the television report from the cinema documentary? Is it possible to speak of television without speaking of the documentary? What place should the documentary occupy in the current system of television? Is the regular programming of documentaries on television only possible on public television?
With the idea of documenting the documentary on television and of offering at the same time examples of the registers which the documentary currently occupies in the medium, MiradasDoc this year proposes a selection of works in the genre made and broadcast on two of the televisions which have most clearly defined the presence of the genre on their screens - although, and precisely for this reason, from different yet complementary perspectives.

TV3 in Catalonia has been a pioneer in Spain regarding giving prime-time space to the documentary genre, and it has done so with a production that is often of its own, which is exemplary in all senses. And Cuatro has investigated formats which were novel in the panorama of Spanish television in programmes in which the documentary and the report cross paths in a very efficient way. These are two examples among many possible ones and it is in all rigour a showing about documentaries and television, about the documentary on television.
The showing is complemented with a round table on the subject in which Jordi Planas, from TV3, and Nieves Sánchez, from Cuatro, together with other guests of the festival, will participate.