Abstract
Documentary film is an art that has preoccupied the human soul for more than a century now. One of the pioneers of this cinematic genre, Dziga Vertov, was the one who managed to give the viewer a different perspective on the world around him, through the ‘cine-eye’, thus creating a new small universe inside man. Ethnographic documentary film is said to have appeared once with the first documentaries, and now there are more and more filmmakers and anthropologists interested in it. In the landscape of the Romanian documentary, Dumitru Budrală is one of these names, but also Nicoară Mihali, on whom we stopped, who deals with themes of Maramureș anthropology, in a documentary rich in visual poetry, in visual symbols. In this study, we chose to analyze the symbolism of water in his film, for which we chose the qualitative methodology as an appropriate one, more precisely the content analysis of the symbolic meanings of water, after which we found a persistence and a trend of using certain meanings of the symbol of water in the chosen documentaries, from the first documentary of the filmmaker, until now.