Carlos González García estudió dirección cinematográfica en la UNAM (CUEC) y posteriormente realizó una maestría en Chapman University, California, como becario Fulbright. Ha trabajado en diversas áreas de la industria audiovisual. Más adelante, se especializó en el desarrollo de contenidos documentales para medios públicos, con dos largometrajes y varias series televisivas. También se ha dedicado con entusiasmo a la docencia y a la crítica cinematográfica. Considera que el cine es una llave que puede abrir casi cualquier puerta: a veces, los lugares a los que se accede a través de lo cinematográfico van más allá de lo que uno podría imaginar.
This paper explores the ethical complexities of contemporary documentary filmmaking through the lens of autobiographical practice. Drawing on nearly three decades of experience as a filmmaker and scholar, I examine how the act of self-inclusion—both as subject and storyteller—can foster a more transparent, responsible, and reflexive mode of documentary production. The autobiographical approach challenges traditional hierarchies between filmmaker and subject, inviting a reconsideration of authorship, power, and representation.
By foregrounding the filmmaker’s own positionality and emotional investment, this mode facilitates a horizontal relationship with participants and audiences alike, offering a potential pathway to ethical clarity in a genre often marked by ambiguity and imbalance.
Drawing on case studies—particularly my own documentary practice—as well as personal reflection and theoretical frameworks like psychoanalysis and performative documentary theory, I argue for autobiography not as narcissistic indulgence, but as an ethical tool that destabilizes truth claims and foregrounds subjectivity as a site of inquiry. Special attention is given to ethical dilemmas involving vulnerable or deceased subjects, and how self-reflexive strategies can mediate issues of consent, gaze, and symbolic power. Ultimately, this paper calls for a renewed discourse on ethics in documentary filmmaking—one that embraces introspection and subjectivity, rethinking the documentary filmmaker's responsibility in the 21st century.
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