IDFA Daily #4 2017 (English) by IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

Viktor Kossakovsky pitching

his Krogufant at the Forum

International Section 22/23 nov 2017

ON: #IDFA2017

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Short, sharp docs IDFA relaunches its competitive shorts strand with Shorts Day By Melanie Goodfellow

The festival celebrates the return of its IDFA Competition for Short Documentary after a decade-long absence, with a special Shorts Day programme of screenings and events around the genre on Wednesday. Creative craft “With all the new distribution opportunities for short documentaries, both offline and online, there’s really something going on with the genre. There are some fantastic films out there. It was obvious we had to start paying more attention to shorts again,” says senior IDFA programmer Martijn te Pas. “Shorts are no longer simply a stepping stone to a first feature; they’ve become a craft in themselves, and are often very creative.” A total of 15 shorts are screening in the inaugural new competition, all of which will be showcased in a special programme in Tuschinski on Wednesday. They have also been playing throughout IDFA’s wider programme in double bills with medium-length works. Pairing One Day in Aleppo, for example, screened alongside Black Stones, capturing the life of a field hospital at the height of the siege of Homs, while Jessica Beshir’s poetic Hairat, about an elderly Ethiopian man’s relationship with a pack of hyenas, was paired with Erik Gandini’s The Rebel Surgeon about a Swedish surgeon working in Ethiopia. “We thought it was a good way to get people to see a short film they might not have gone to see if it played on its own or in a shorts programme. It was a way of making the audience discover the films”, says Te Pas. Wide selection IDFA junior programmer Jasper Hokken has also been instrumental in relaunching the competition, visiting several key Photo: Ruud Jonkers

shorts festivals over the year, such as Clermont-Ferrand and Oberhausen, to get the word out. He highlights the stylistic range of works in the competition. “We tried to pull together as wide a selection as possible. We have animation, an archive film, a hybrid work, a film using puppetry and a number of personal truth stories,” he says. Te Pas notes the presence of Ben Knight’s The Last Honey Hunter about an ageing Nepalese honey gatherer. “It’s a beautiful 4K work from National Geographic, and not a typical IDFA film.”

Other highlights include the world premiere of As We’re Told, capturing life in Sweden’s bureaucratic state employment agency by combining transcripts of real conversations between the employees with puppet representations – with deadpan, comic effect. It is co-directed by Swedish filmmakers Erik Holmström and Fredrik Wenzel, best known in the film industry as the cinematographer of Ruben Östlund on works such as Force Majeure and The Square. Dutch entries include Tara Fallaux’s Love Letters in which five people in their 20s read out loud the most intimate letter they ever wrote. There are also two animation works: Five Years After the War, about a French Jewish man who goes in search of his roots in Iraq, and Lon about a talented Jewish theatre set designer working in Antwerp in the 1930s, who died in the Holocaust. Other contenders include Personal Truth, examining the power of fake news, by British director Charlie Lyne, whose recent work includes Fish Tale. It is produced by Lyne, Catherine Bray and Anthony Ing for Loop Projects Limited and Laura Poitras for Field of Vision. Rare acquisition Jason Hanasik’s How to Make a Pearl – a moving portrait of visual artist and musician John Kapellas, who lives in darkness after developing a medical condition known as photosensitivity – get its international premiere at IDFA after world premiering at DOC NYC last week, and was executive produced by Minette Nelson and The Guardian’s head of documentary, Charlie Phillips.

“This was a rare acquisition for us. We took it after Jason showed it in his graduation show at Berkeley,” says Phillips. “This is rare for us – nearly all our films are original commissions, but I felt like this could do something different for us. It’s so moving, so mysterious, so strange; a little pearl.” Industry session Phillips will be among a number of professionals sitting in on an industry session on Wednesday entitled Short Opportunities, looking at the evolving short doc scene. Other speakers will include Lindsay Crouse, editor at the New York Times Op-Docs department specialising in short non-fiction, as well as Tom Oyer, membership and awards manager at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Oyer’s participation is linked to the fact that, with the reinstatement of the shorts competition, IDFA is now a qualifying festival for the Academy Awards shorts category. This means this year’s winner will automatically be up for consideration in the 2019 awards.

Wouter Jansen at shorts distribution and festival strategy agency Some Shorts, who will be moderating the session, welcomes the return of a shorts competition. “It makes a lot of sense. Watching the films they selected this year, you clearly see the diversity of short films and also the type of storytelling that’s only possible in this timespan,” he says. “Because of the lack of strong commercial dependency, there is a lot more freedom for the filmmakers. They can stray from the conventional paths you see in features. A film like Hairat or As We’re Told wouldn’t be possible in a feature format.” He notes, however, that while there are more funding and distribution opportunities than ever for short documentaries, it is still extremely hard to monetise short content. “Only a few weeks ago a big newspaper contacted me because they wanted to premiere a short documentary in one of their online articles. In return we would only get some ‘good exposure’ for the film. Although people understand the power that short films have, they don’t want to pay for this.”

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17-11-14 11:40

Kossakovsky’s Krogufant Other buzzy titles at the Forum included The Self Portrait, The Mole Agent, Writing with Fire and People’s Hospital.

Pitching up: The Forum Photo: Ruud Jonkers By Melanie Goodfellow

Russian filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky has unveiled fresh details on his upcoming documentary Krogufant, exploring the emotional life of farm animals destined for our dining room tables at the IDFA Forum. Speaking at the final session in the Central Pitches on Tuesday, Kossakovsky explained the title took its cue from a children’s book about an imaginary animal combining a crocodile, jaguar and elephant. His film will focus on pigs, cows and hens. Typically, Kossakovsky – who was joined on the pitching stage by his producer Anita Rehoff Larsen at Norwegian company Sant & Usant – went off script. “They’re going to kill me because I am not going to follow my script,” the filmmaker told the commissioners, sales agents and producers assembled in the Compagnietheater. “A few of my closest friends just left the room. They said, ‘No, we’re not going to listen to you or watch your trailer, you will convince us to be vegan and before lunch it’s not a good pitch’,” he added.

“Don’t worry guys, I’m not to show you concentration camps with millions of pigs. I am not going to show you slaughtering. I guess we’ve already seen lots of films about slaughtering and it still didn’t work, we still don’t get it”, continued the director. The director instead plans to show a sow, cow and chicken with her offspring in their first two months of life. He gave a taster of the black and white, observational approach he is planning with a trailer showing a sow with her young litter, which he dedicated to Ally Derks. The project and trailer drew an enthusiastic response from the commissioners on the floor. Not all the broadcasters felt they could offer it a slot in their schedules, but funders with a more creative, theatrical editorial line were enthusiastic. Tabitha Jackson, head of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, praised “the strength of the directorial voice” and “the execution”. Other buzzy projects presented this year included arts documentary The Self Portrait,

about a woman suffering from severe anorexia who turns to photography as a form of therapy, and Maite Alberdi’s The Mole Agent, about an octogenarian undercover agent placed in an old people’s home to investigate reports of abuse. Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas’s Writing with Fire, about a digital news agency run by a group of rural women belonging to the so-called ‘untouchables’ community, and People’s Hospital were also titles cited by commissioners quizzed after the final Central Pitches session. The latter delves into the reality of China’s health system through a wry, fly-on-the-wall approach looking at the widening gulf between patients and health staff. It is the debut feature of Siyi Chen, who studied documentary in New York and Peking, in collaboration with up-and-coming producer Ruochan Xu, who worked with Nanfu Wang on Hooligan Sparrow and I Am Another You. “I was happy to see Writing with Fire went really well, as did People’s Hospital with its great trailer showing fantastic access. It’s a new generation and a female filmmaker so that’s great”, said IDFA Industry chief Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen. “But I think what people really liked this year, especially in the Central Pitches, was the great variety ... political stories, investigative stories like Sunken Eldorado, art stories. Obviously, not every project was for everyone, but I think the selection went well”, she added. The Forum continues on Wednesday with Round Table Pitches including Magnus Gertten’s new project With Love, about a woman now living in hiding in Sweden who was forced to flee her native Uzbekistan after her efforts to get her brother freed from a remote desert jail propelled her into a murderous web of intrigue.

Boys are back in town Dutch production house Een van de jongens (English: One of the boys) is having a stellar IDFA, with two films in Kids & Docs competition (L I S T E N and Andy’s Promise); Hello Salaam in IDFA Junior; the five-part series Nettiquette worldpremiering in the Schools Program and featurelength doc The Bastard in Docs for Sale.

And the winners are… On Monday morning at 11 am, some fifty-five programmers from film festivals all over the world met in café Kapitein Zeppos in Amsterdam to select their unofficial ‘best documentary at IDFA’. After much discussion, the informal gathering, organised by DOCVILLE coordinator & programmer Frank Moens, were unable to narrow the field to just one winner, and so chose two films to be the joint recipients of this unofficial accolade. The joint winners are: Laura Bari’s Primas and Nanfu Wang’s I am Another You.

Andy’s Promise

The 15-minute L I S T E N directed Astrid Bussink presents a cross-section of conversations between children and the Dutch Child Line service, accompanied by images that give colour to the conversations and reflect their tone. In Nathalie Crum’s Andy’s Promise, a thirteen-year-old boy makes a promise to his grandfather and mother – never to abandon the local traditional ‘militia’ organisation, which was their pride and joy. Kim Brand’s Hello Salaam was selected for DOK Leipzig official selection, won 2nd Jury Prize at Chicago and was nominated for the ECFA Youth Doc Award. In the five-part series Nettiquette, filmmaker Mea Dols de Jong explores where the rules of social media derive from. The Bastard, directed by Floris-Jan van Luyn, and currently in post-production, tells of Ethiopian murder convict Damiel, whose story (and that of his father) turns out to be a harrowing tale of destiny and DNA, racism and responsibilities. “We believe youth documentary is very important,” stresses producer Hasse van Nunen. “Over the years we’ve been specializing in the sector (although the company is producing adult-themed feature docs in the form of The Bastard and Tom Fassaert’s new doc A Beautiful Stranger). It’s great fun making them and it’s important we show children not just cartoons or vlogs, but more about the real world. We take youth documentary as seriously as feature length documentary … but if we were to only focus on youth documentaries then we couldn’t pay the bills.” By Nick Cunningham

Shifting Perspectives: The Arab World panel

Arab filmmakers debate their place in the world By Melanie Goodfellow

Top Arab filmmakers Diana El Jeiroudi, Raed Andoni and Mohanad Yaqubi joined an IDFA industry discussion this week to discuss the place of Arab documentaries in the wider film world, both in terms of finding finance and producing partners as well as audiences. The panel was part of the festival programme Shifting Perspectives: The Arab World showcasing sixteen classic and new Arab documentaries including the opening film Amal, Andoni’s Ghost Hunting and Omar Amiralay’s 2004 film A Flood In Baath Country. The opening remarks of Beirut-based moderator Rasha Salti, a respected film curator who has programmed Arab films for a number of festivals and institutions including the Toronto International Film Festival and the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, made for a telling introduction. “One of the first things I had to learn is to mediate Arab cinema to non-Arab audiences and then to mediate Arab cinema to Arab audiences”, she said. “The Arab world has been, throughout the twentieth century, a region where there have been many conflicts, a region where there is a history of colonisation and decolonisation, and also a region where cinema came extremely early, with images of the Arab world produced early on, especially of Palestine, but also a territory of projection,” she continued. “With Arab cinema, the idea is that Arab filmmakers and artists produce their own representation, on their own terms.” Salti noted that the rise of digital technology had radically altered the Arab cinema scene, opening it up to people who previously would not have had the opportunity to be filmmakers. The big question at the heart of the debate was whether and how Arab filmmakers should connect with collaborators and audiences outside the region. Palestinian producer and director Mohanad Yaqubi, whose directorial credits include Off Frame Aka Revolution Until Victory, said traditional co-production deals favoured by European partners did not always work for Arab feature productions being made on small budgets. Using the example of Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif’s experimental first feature Ouroboros, inspired by her experiences in Gaza during a Israeli military offensive on the strip in 2012, Yaqubi demonstrated how more fluid, less formal co-operation sometimes worked better. He explained how he preferred to build an international team around informal collaborations, rather than trying to go through official co-production treaties. “I love to build a team in a vagabond away, bringing on cinematographers, sound designers, in an informal way rather than going through the paperwork of co-production deals which can take a lot of time”, he said. Lead-producing under his Idioms Film banner, Yaqubi also bought Belgian company Luna Blue Film and Sweden’s Momento Films on board Ouroboros, as well as support from the Arab cultural fund AFAC and the Doha Film Institute. “We brought what you need for an artist to have a space in which to work,” said Yaqubi. Syrian director and producer El Jeiroudi recalled how difficult she had found pitching Dolls: A Woman from Damascus at the Forum, even though it had helped the feature on to an international career. “I don’t know, perhaps Palestine is more internationalised, but I am part of generation of filmmakers that emerged in the 1990s who were not educated at films schools in Russia or Eastern Europe or France. We were not formatted. We were very uncultivated. The shift from my first to second feature documentary was huge for me.”

Film Center Serbia presents

SERBIA

@IDFA17

In Praise of Nothing

The Other Side of Everything

The Same

Mila Turajlić | Serbia, France, Qatar | 2017 | 104 min.

Dejan Petrović | Serbia | 2017 | 17 min.

Boris Mitić | Serbia, Croatia, France | 2017 | 78 min.

Nov 18th