Humans have created various ways of storytelling – tales, paintings, novels, narratives, songs, poetry, films – through the accumulation of imagination and numerous experiences, whether good, bad, humorous, or sorrowful. Sometimes they’re incredible, sometimes exaggerated, or perhaps entirely untrue. For some stories, we don’t even know which parts are true and which are false, as evident in history, epics, chronicles, and legends.

Amidst fluctuations and transitions of love, hatred, destruction, war, hardship, catastrophe, collapse and rebirth occurring every day. Documentary is one path to tell these stories.

But what is a documentary? This is a basic question that we still seek to answer, because documentary has no fixed definition, and because we still don’t know exactly what it is.

The International Documentary Film Festival What the Doc! (WTD!) was thus born to explore the diverse landscape of documentaries. Today, its realm is so vast, sometimes complex, sometimes overlapping or blending with other storytelling approaches, and its boundaries continue to be pushed further.