International Section 17/18 nov 2016
Growing up in public Interviewed in transit a few days before the beginning of IDFA, speaking from a bus and then a train, IDFA founder and festival director Ally Derks is upbeat about what will be her final festival at the helm before she makes her official farewell in 2017 – the 30th anniversary of the event she helped coax into being. By Geoffrey Macnab “I think the baby has grown up. It is time for mother to leave the house”, Derks explains of the thinking behind her departure next February. She will be in Berlin for a year as an invited fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, but will be back in Amsterdam next November to take a final bow at IDFA (but will remain involved in an advisory role). Casting her eye over the 2016 programme, which she describes as “one of the best ever”, Derks picks out some highlights. For anyone looking for respite from frenetic digital-era doc making, there is the “slow documentary” sidebar overseen by senior programmer Martijn te Pas. “He has been walking around with this idea for ages. We gave him carte blanche… I think it’s a great idea.” The Quiet Eye programme, including such recent titles as Ben Rivers’ Two Years At Sea (2011) and South to North (2015) by Antoine Boutet, will screen during the last weekend of the festival and will allow the festival to finish off in a “Zen mood.”
Top 10
It is largely Donald Trump’s fault that Michael Moore won’t be presenting his Top 10 at IDFA this year. The Bowling For Columbine director had planned to be in Amsterdam, but decided he needed to concentrate his energies on the US election. Instead, Derks recruited Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa to pick his top 10 films. “He is a fantastic filmmaker, a real cinematographer and a great observer”,
Derks says of the director whose latest doc Austerlitz (screening in the official selection) takes a quizzical look at the phenomenon of Holocaust tourism. Derks is intrigued and delighted by his Top 10. They’re not “obvious” titles, she says. There’s no Chris Marker or Fred Wiseman. Instead, he has gone for films such as Chantal Akerman’s little-seen From the East and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s film I Don’t Know, about a whistle-blower in Soviet-era Poland. As ever, this year’s festival will see all sorts of filmmakers and special guests in town: Fred Wiseman, possibly rock star Iggy Pop, and French bad-boy novelist Michel Houellebecq (who both feature in Erik Lieshout’s doc To Stay Alive – A Method) as well as distinguished former CNN journalist Jean Carper, whose debut film Monsters in the Mind (about dementia) screens in Best of Fests.
DocLab 10
Derks expresses her pride that DocLab, the section that explores how the digital revolution is re-shaping documentary, has reached its 10th anniversary. Head of New Media Caspar Sonnen was keen to showcase the best digital work to have passed through the section during this period but some of this, Derks explains, turned out to be unavailable. “He wanted to have 100 projects online from the last 10 years, but some of them were impossible to put online because the software and technology behind them has already disappeared!”
Cream of the crop
In recent years, the festival has spread its tentacles all over Amsterdam. This year, there is another new venue, Theatre Carré, which has around 2,000 seats. The opening film, Stranger in Paradise by Dutch director Guido Hendrikx, screens here. “We can all be together. That’s great!” Derks says of the increased capacity the Carré gives the festival.
Barbara Visser and Ally Derks at the opening of IDFA in Carré. Photo: Nichon Glerum
Although by Derks’ own admission IDFA is now “very, very big”, the festival retains its intimate feel. This, she believes, is one of the festival’s greatest achievements. There will be close to 300 films screening this year, 120 of them world premieres. Titles range in length from seven hours (O.J.: Made in America by director Ezra Edelman) to just a few minutes. With more cinemas available, it is possible to show the films more often. IDFA still gets the cream of the crop, even if ‘fiction’ festivals like Berlin are programming more and more docs – and offering very generous prizes to documentary makers.
Heaven
Filmmakers in Europe may fret that public service broadcasters don’t support them the way they once did, but Derks believes docs are in a healthier state now than when IDFA was launched. She and her programmers had 3,500 titles submitted this year. Quantity “may not mean quality”, but there are more and more gems to unearth. “Access is much bigger than it has ever been before. There are more documentaries made now than ever before”, Derks says. “Compared to 30 years ago, we are living in heaven.”
Rude health
Dutch documentary, Derks believes, is in rude health too. “The Dutch are really fantastic this year. I am so happy. It’s my last year and I don’t have to say things aren’t going well with Dutch documentary. No, they are really doing great. Last year, we couldn’t select fifteen films because we didn’t think the quality was high enough. Now, it has been easy to choose fifteen films.” As for herself, Derks says she is “very much looking forward first to this year. Next year, I will say goodbye – and we will party!”