At a master class held on 8 May at Warsaw’s State Ethnographic Museum, Swedish-Italian filmmaker Erik Gandini and his long-time editor and composer Johan Söderberg reflected on a 25-year creative partnership that has produced such works as Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers, Videocracy, The Swedish Theory of Love and After Work.

Introducing the session, Millennium Docs Against Gravity (MDAG) founder and director Artur Liebhart described the collaboration between director and editor as one of the most crucial relationships in filmmaking, before recalling Gandini’s long-standing connection with the festival. Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers, he noted, had been shown at the very first edition of MDAG in 2004, where it won the Audience Award. The film returned to the festival this year as part of a programme revisiting Gandini and Söderberg’s shared body of work.

Gandini opened by stressing that editors remain undervalued, especially in creative documentary. “Editors are really underrated still, which is bizarre,” he said. “They are not only the most important part in a documentary process, but they’re also the smartest people in the world.” In essayistic documentaries, he continued, there is rarely a pre-existing dramatic template to follow. Unlike true crime, thrillers or romantic comedies, such films have to invent their structure during the process itself.

Söderberg was more laconic. “This is a master class. We don’t know how to do a master class,” he joked, before explaining that their working method differs from more linear approaches to documentary editing. Rather than building from beginning to end, he said, they work through themes, fragments and tonal blocks. “Erik talks for one day, and then he brings me materials. I look through all the material, and I look for the key words,” he explained. “They’re the words that you can use as a refrain in a song. Then I look at the rhythm and the tonality in those words. And the film starts to develop from that.”

The pair used Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers as their first case study, returning to the political climate of the early 2000s, the anti-globalisation movement and the rise of corporate branding. Gandini recalled wanting to make a documentary that could compete aesthetically with advertising, rather than simply countering it with rational argument. He saw Söderberg’s background in music videos, advertising and rhythmic editing as a way to turn the tools of consumer culture against themselves.

Söderberg described their films as being assembled almost like a set of musical pieces. “All material is like an island,” he said, adding that they often end up with “seven, eight or nine music videos” before beginning the larger composition. Gandini added that their documentaries are often idea-driven, rather than character-driven: the people on screen may be vivid and memorable, but they function as part of a wider conceptual architecture.

Music emerged as one of the master class’s central themes. Söderberg, who studied percussion and has played in numerous bands, said rhythm is embedded in the way he hears speech. Gandini noted that when Söderberg listens to an interview, he immediately picks up the pace and musicality of the speaker. This sensibility, he argued, gives their films an “extra dimension” that is not purely rational or explanatory, but immersive.

Discussing Videocracy, Gandini said the turning point came when they stopped imposing their own dark, dystopian feelings onto the material. The film’s subjects, he observed, did not see themselves as living in a nightmare. They were enthusiastic, ambitious or simply at ease in the media world they inhabited. “We realised that we should go with the character,” he said. “It changed the film not 50%, but 200%.”

The discussion later turned to After Work – particularly, the struggle over voice-over. Söderberg recalled that, at one stage, the film had become overloaded with explanatory narration. “I saw it and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the most boring film I’ve ever seen’,” he said. “We were explaining things via voice-overs for maybe one minute between each sequence in order to connect all the dots.” He then spent several days stripping the voice-over away. Gandini agreed that over-explanation is one of the great dangers of documentary: “We always struggle with this problem of clarity. [We believe] people don’t understand or don’t follow.”

In response to a question about how he gained access to controversial figures in Italian showbiz, such as Lele Mora for Videocracy, Gandini said that Italy in the 2000s was “a paradise for documentary filmmakers” because many television personalities had little understanding of documentary culture and did not perceive a Swedish crew as a threat. More recently, he added, he and Söderberg have used carefully edited, non-ironic fragments to gain access to far-right Christian natalist circles in the United States for their new project.

The pair also offered a brief glimpse of that upcoming film, which explores the demographic revolution and ageing societies. Gandini said the project is built around a speculative “what if” approach, asking how documentary might capture not only what has happened, but what could happen. During a preview clip shot in Rome, an old priest argues how the world’s future will be determined by the elderly, set to number 2.5 billion by 2050. This dramatic demographic shift, he claims, will inevitably restructure society in its entirety.

Asked how filmmakers can avoid both over-explaining and under-explaining, Söderberg gave the simplest answer of the afternoon: “You try once again. You try again. You take a rest.” Gandini closed by defending uncertainty as the very essence of creative documentary. Unlike an industry obsessed with security, bestsellers and guaranteed outcomes, he said, documentary remains “a guarantee-free genre” – and should be proud of it.