Journal November 15/16
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"Infused with warm humour and longing" Carmen Gray for Modern Times Review
Wat gebeurt er als het stof is neergedaald en de camera’s zijn verdwenen? Bekijk het op human.nl/docs MOMENTO FILM
PRESENTS
H A M A D A (həˈmɑːdə) n. (geology) a desert terrain that consists of a flat and rocky area mainly devoid of sand Among the Sahrawis it also refers to "emptiness" or "lifelesness"
DIRECTED BY
ELOY D OMÍNGUEZ SERÉN
S C R E E N I N G D AT E S 15/11 – 18:45 – Tuschinski 1 17/11 – 17:15 – Munt 9 19/11 – 13:00 – Munt 12 21/11 – 12:45 – EYE Cinema 1 23/11 – 15:15 – Groninger Forum 3 24/11 – 22:00 – Tuschinski 4
Beeld: Westwood: Punk. Icon. Activist.
Het Uur van de Wolf op IDFA
Focus Program
Space odyssey It’s ‘space’ – but not as we know it. One of IDFA’s most inventive conceptual sidebars this year looks at the use of space in documentary filmmaking. Geoffrey Macnab boldly goes where no IDFA reporter has been before. programme”, Daamen says of the selection. ‘Space’ as explored in this programme takes many forms. “Sometimes, space has a historical meaning; sometimes, space is used as a psychological metaphor for the people who are portrayed in the film; sometimes, as with The Hidden City, the film is all about space”, Daamen reflects. Of course, every documentary engages with space in some way or another. The programmers were looking for 10 films that had
Karim Aïnouz’s Central Airport THF revolves around Berlin’s Tempelhof airport – a revered old building re-invented in recent years as a centre for refugees. Airports, Daamen notes, are generally “non-spaces” – places people
The Hidden City
Joost Daamen Photo: Felix Kalkman
‘Space’ is part of the long-running series of programmes curated by Joost Daamen and Laura van Halsema on the art of the documentary. Topics previously covered include cinematography, editing and sound design. The idea this year is look specifically at how documentaries use space, and to discuss this with the directors in the Doc Talks afterwards. “We said, okay, let’s skip all the classics and only focus on the new films in the
“something extra” and that were “layered” and subtle in their use of space. RaMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening is set in the Black Belt in the Deep South of the US, an area with a troubled history of guilt around slavery. Its director, though, looks in on this world in a poetic fashion. “[Hale County] is a film […] in which space has a historical connotation, but also in which the space in which people are defines their social positions”, Daamen suggests.
pass through while leaving or arriving. The refugees, though, are stranded in this no man’s land. On the other side of the fence, they can see German citizens and tourists enjoying the freedom of movement they crave. Daamen also sees Gabrielle Brady’s Island of the Hungry Ghosts as an ideal choice – a film set on a tropical island full of migrating crabs that also houses a detention centre for illegal immigrants. Sergei Loznitsa’s Victory Day explores history, nationalism and how people use spaces to evoke the past in a way they feel comfortable with. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s The Border Fence focuses on a small square of land between Austria and Italy on which a fence has been built, which has become a battleground for competing opinions about immigration, national identity, refugees and belonging. Ekta Mittal’s Absence, meanwhile, concentrates on those left behind in small villages in rural India which young people have left in search of work. One of the attractions of the Space programme is that filmmakers will have the chance to discuss their work in a sophisticated fashion, focusing on form. For once they won’t just be talking about the storyline and characters. Having ventured into space, Daamen and Van Halsema are already looking ahead to next year’s festival. What comes after space? “We will do something to do with time”, Daamen suggests. The likelihood is that this timethemed programme will explore the use of archive material and found footage. •
News
Fortissimo resurgent Fortissimo Films is one of the best respected names in Asian and independent art house distribution. The company may have slipped into bankruptcy in 2016, but Fortissimo has restructured and is back in business.
In the past, Fortissimo had very strong links with leading Dutch directors, including Alex van Warmerdam (Borgman, The Dress). Rozing suggests it is “too early to say” whether the company will continue to work with Van Warmerdam and other leading Dutch talents. “I do see some things that are very interesting, but whenever it is a Dutch film, I always ask for a second opinion. Maybe because it is our home turf, we are a little too close to that”, Rozing suggests. However, Rozing has confirmed that Fortissimo will be combining its sales and distribution activities with some marketing and PR work.
Up the Mountain
The Amsterdam and Beijing-based outfit was at the Toronto Festival earlier this autumn with a slate of new films, many of which have subsequently gone on to screen at major festivals. Ramin Matin’s Turkish comedy Siren’s Call went on to have its world premiere in competition in Tokyo; Song Wen’s The Enigma of Arrival surfaced in Busan’s ‘Window on Asian Cinema’; Zhou Zhou’s lesbian drama Meili was in competition in Thessaloniki and Da Peng’s docu-drama A Final Reunion was at the Golden Horse Festival in Taiwan. Fortissimo is now at IDFA this week with its feature documentary, a world premiere in the Competition for Feature-Length Documentary, Up the Mountain from Chinese director Yang Zhang. As General Manager Gabrielle Rozing points out, “documentary has always been part of our programme.” Look through
the one hand, Fortissimo is looking for films from the Asian market with international potential, and on the other for international titles that might work in Asia.
Fortissimo’s back catalogue and you’ll find plenty of feature docs about artists and photographers such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Annie Liebovitz and Robert Mapplethorpe. The company has also worked with Yang Zhang several times before, on such titles as Quitting and Shower. Up the Mountain is the first of three new feature documentaries by Zhang Yang
Fortissimo is representing. The other two – Mao Mao Cool and Voice of Dali, which also explore life in China’s Yunnan Province – are in post-production. Fortissimo is understood to have significant Chinese backing, but Rozing isn’t yet in a position to make any announcements on this. What is clear is that the company is now properly reopened, with a double-headed strategy. On
Rozing is excited by a documentary market she describes as “more flexible” that its fiction equivalent. “Interesting things are happening”, she suggests. “If you look at directors like Ester Gould and Morgan Knibbe, they try to tell stories in a different way, sometimes blending fiction and documentary. I also see that the audiences are interested in all kinds of documentary. That is not only in Europe, but is definitely also the case in Asia.” • By Geoffrey Macnab
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Inclusive strategy Inside IDFA
IDFA’s new artistic director Orwa Nyrabia talks to Melanie Goodfellow about his ambitions to weave gender equality into the very fabric of the festival as part of his longer-term inclusion drive.
IDFA’s newly-installed artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, overseeing his first edition less than a year after his appointment last January, has hit the ground running as he fills the shoes of IDFA’s larger-than-life founding chief Ally Derks, who was at the heart of the event for 30 years. Syrian producer, filmmaker and long-time IDFA collaborator Nyrabia who, like Derks, has co-founded and ran a documentary festival from scratch in the shape of Syria’s now mothballed Dox Box Film Festival, has lost no time setting his vision for his new Amsterdam berth in motion. One of the top priorities informing Nyrabia’s strategy for the festival is to make IDFA more inclusive. He acknowledges that IDFA’s track record on this score is one of the best on the international festival circuit, but says there is still much more work to be done. “Inclusion will be one of the big headline themes, policies of my work at IDFA in the coming years, both in terms of gender and geography”, Nyrabia explains. Charter As part of this drive, in September IDFA became the first documentary festival to sign the international film festival 5050x2020 gender equality charter. Spearheaded by the French gender equality pressure group and think-tank Le Collectif 5050, the initiative was launched at the Cannes Film Festival last May and has since been signed up to by a slew of festivals including Venice, Toronto, San Sebastian and Sarajevo. Under the charter, festivals pledge to compile statistics to record the gender of the filmmakers
and key crew of all submissions; to improve transparency around selection processes by publicly listing the members of selection and programming committees; and to work towards parity on executive boards. This is one of a raft of film industry gender equality initiatives launched this year amid the global discussion around female representation in the cinema
Board
IDFA organizational chart Male
Female
40 %
Administration / HR
50 %
Administration Department
75 %
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Head of Development
0%
Head of Production & IT
0%
Development Department
100 %
Production & IT Department
50 %
Head of Marketing & Communication
100 %
Marketing & Communication Department
100 %
business, which has been reinvigorated by the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal at the end of 2017 and subsequent creation of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. “When the 5050x2020 charter was proposed in Cannes, I thought it seemed like a very feasible, doable route to gender equality. It’s a very valid prop-
Direction 0%
Head of New Media / IDFA DocLab
0%
New Media / IDFA DocLab Department
100 %
Head of Education
100 %
Education Department
50 %
Senior Programmers
25 %
Program Department & Advisors
56 %
Head of IDFA Industry
100 %
Industry Department
100 %
Films by female directors at IDFA 2014-2018 Male
Female
Submitted
Selected
Rather than wait for the first best media coverage opportunity, such as a signing ceremony at this year’s edition of IDFA, we decided to get on with it right away.
Orwa Nyrabia Photo: Bert Nienhuis
on sensitive topics such as the ‘female gaze’; and IDFA’s first comprehensive study of its own track-record, scrutinizing festival data from 2003 to 2013.
osition”, Nyrabia says. “When we were approached by the founders to see whether we were interested in signing it, we jumped at the chance. Rather than wait for the first best media coverage opportunity, such as a signing ceremony at this year’s edition of IDFA, we decided to get on with it right away. We didn’t want to lose time.” Prominent role Delphyne Besse, head of international sales and acquisitions at Paris-based Urban Distribution International and a founding member of Le Collectif 5050, says IDFA’s signing of the charter is significant because the event “plays such a prominent role on the documentary circuit. There is a common intuition that the situation in documentary filmmaking is better than fiction and animation, but when you look closer at the figures you come across the same issues as in other fields when it comes to women filmmakers. They have less access to bigger budgets, for instance.” “IDFA demonstrates a strong and sincere interest in working towards equality and diversity, and by signing the pledge they simply reinforce their commitment and position themselves as leaders on the documentary festival circuit. The pledge is a first step and we are looking forward to working hand-in-hand with IDFA to develop more initiatives towards parity and inclusion in documentary filmmaking”, she adds. This is not the first time IDFA has turned its attention to the issue of gender equality. In 2014, Derks spearheaded a wide-ranging focus on women in documentary, encompassing a sidebar of 28 films by women, selected by 15 top female documentarians including Kim Longinotto, Barbara Kopple and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad; a heated debate on female representation in the documentary world, touching
Fabric of the festival Some four years on, Nyrabia wants to expand this work, to weave gender equality into the very structure and fabric of the festival, so that women are present in equal measure throughout. It is also important, he adds, that IDFA’s other initiatives, such as the IDFAcademy, Forum and IDFA Bertha Fund, are also fully inclusive and supportive of female filmmakers and documentary professionals. Nyrabia and his team have gone back and looked at IDFA’s data to create a fresh report on how the festival has performed in terms of female representation throughout its various sections, both in recent editions and specifically this year. “This year, films by female filmmakers will account for 41% of the programme,” he says. “By comparison with other film festivals that’s not bad, but it’s not 50:50.” Nyrabia emphasises, however, that he does not want to impose gender parity quotas on the selection committees. “I’m not for quotas. What I would like to achieve is a situation where over a number of years the average is close to 50:50, so in some years there could be more female filmmakers and in others, the selection includes more films by men, but overall parity is achieved.” He notes that this year women directors are in the majority in the First Appearance competition, aimed at works by emerging filmmakers, while there are more male contenders in the Kids & Docs competition. “For the first time ever, we have more men than women in the Kids & Doc programme. We were surprised – it has always been a section with more films by women, but that’s the point – it’s not about quotas but rather putting the elements in place so that over time it averages out.” Change from within Nyrabia says IDFA has also started analysing female representation within its own structure and processes. “We’ve been looking at our own organisational charts and decision-making processes. This is part of a longterm strategic plan to become a more just organisation, giving support and opportunity to filmmakers and professionals of all genders”, he says. As part of this review, the festival has already tweaked the gender split for the members of its pre-selection viewing committee. “The programming team still remains predominantly male, but now there is a higher percentage of female viewers in the pre-selection team, which is a start”, he says. He also notes that there is a higher percentage of female jury members across the festival’s ten competitive sections this year, with 18 women compared to 16 men participating in the juries. Crucially, there are more women than men on the
five-person jury for the festival’s main IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary, comprising CEO of Paris-based sales company Doc & Film International Daniela Elstner, filmmakers Tala Hadid, Alina Marazzi with Mahamat-Saleh Haroun and critic Jean-Michel Frodon. The bigger picture Going deeper into the issue, Nyrabia suggests that achieving gender equality within the context of IDFA and the wider documentary scene is not just about numbers. The festival and its artistic and professional guests, he says, need to embrace a new approach and mind-set with regard to female filmmakers. “Looking at the total number of women in the programme is not enough. We also need a qualitative, as well as a quantitative, approach. It’s about the position of female filmmakers in the programme, how we’re highlighting them, whether we’re giving them the right platform”, he explains. He notes, for example, that nearly all the directors celebrated in IDFA’s long-running Guest of Honour sidebar – in which a leading documentarian presents a selection of their Top Ten favourite documentaries – have been predominantly male. Rigged system This year’s Guest of Honour invitation to filmmaker Helena Třeštíková – a household name in her native Czech Republic but relatively unknown outside of Eastern Europe – was the result of a conscious move by the festival to shift this dynamic, Nyrabia says. “Helena Třeštíková is one of documentary world’s most outstanding, exceptional masters, but nobody really knows her outside of the Czech Republic. This really lays the issue bare. Her work is world-class, absolutely top-notch, but she’s unknown. It’s an example of how the system is rigged against women.” Her invitation, he says, was the result of long reflection by both himself and the IDFA team. “We had to challenge ourselves, to watch again and to discuss. We all have blind spots. We’re all trained to be receptive to a more male style of filmmaking, types of dramaturgy and frontline stories… male is the mainstream. We all need to train ourselves to go back again and again and ask, ‘Did we miss something?’” •
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MEDIA invests in documentaries! The EU invests more than € 100 million annually in the European film and audiovisual industries through several funding schemes within MEDIA, the audiovisual subprogramme of Creative Europe. MEDIA has supported the development and international distribution of thousands of films, including jewels like Amy, Fuocoammare, I’m not Your Negro and Bergman – A Year in a Life. Want to find out what MEDIA can do for you? Get in touch with the MEDIA desk in your country: bit.ly/contactMEDIAdesks
@MEDIAprogEU @CreativeEuropeEU
I DFA Com p et it ion Program s 2018
AMMODO × IDFA A M MOD O. ORG / I DFA
Focus Program
The documentary will be serialized
In an age defined in part by the cynical manipulation of audio-visual media, we asked leading filmmakers and critics to discuss the concept of truth; our responsibility towards it and the means of measuring it. In our first column, filmmaker Sophie Fiennes grapples with narrative truth.
Sophie Fiennes Photo: Felix Kalkman
Nick Cunningham talks to programmer Jasper Hokken about IDFA 2018’s experiment with screening series
The Column of Truth
Jasper Hokken Photo: Felix Kalkman
IDFA 2018’s inaugural Serialized programme will range from two marathon screenings of entire TV series (Steve James’ America to Me and Matthew Heinemann’s The Trade) to a brace of blitz-style web series comprising numerous episodes compressed into a screening of no longer than an hour’s duration (Bruno Masi’s The Barricade and Leonard Cohen’s Flavours of Iraq). A work-in-progress about putting on a doc fest in the bucolic French countryside (The Village by noted filmmaker Claire Simon) completes the programme. Serialized was devised as an experiment by the festival partly to meet general audience and filmmaker demand but also (finally) to give a home to the series
form, which had previously been dispersed throughout other sections. “Documentary series have been booming over the past couple of years, they are all around us and part of our daily life through platforms like Netflix or HBO or even online,” points out programme curator Jasper Hokken. “At IDFA over the past couple of years, we have been discussing not if we should present them, but how we should present them.” Different perspectives The matter was settled this year after IDFA programmers saw Steve James’ 623-minute America to Me at Sundance, and selected it on the spot. The film exposes the radically different standards of education available to students of different ethnic origins in the US. Matthew Heinemann’s The Trade (262 mins) is a five-part miniseries that offers a nuanced and unsettling glimpse into the heroin production/distribution/ consumption cycle. Meanwhile the 50-minute Flavours of Iraq, selected for IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling as well as for Humanoid Cookbook, comprises 20 sensuous animated films that portray the life, family and homeland of an Iraqi-French journalist. The Barricade (51 minutes) offers 20 max. 3-minute accounts of the most violent days of protest in Paris 1968. “The Barricade was originally released through Twitter 50 years after the protests, hour by hour as live cover-
age of the events happened that day, and told from two different imagined perspectives,” explains Hokken. “We are going to present it on computers at the Ketelhuis, but we decided to show it in cinemas as well so we could invite the filmmakers to discuss the series with our audiences.” Serialized will screen the first four episodes of Claire Simon’s work-inprogress The Village, about the agrarian/ cultural ups and downs in the Ardèchois village of Lussas, a most unlikely setting for a major doc festival. “This is really an exclusive avant-premiere of the series”, Hokken affirms. Industry sessions Two industry sessions on November 21 will delve more deeply into the Serialized offer. The first will analyse the production/finance of The Barricade and Flavour of Iraq and why the filmmakers chose online for their distribution; in the second, Steve James and Claire Simon will discuss and explain the creative processes behind their series and why they chose this particularly long form. “I think audiences will leave IDFA with the knowledge that the quality of these series is really high, that the stories are really engaging and that it makes sense for some of these stories to be told this way, instead of in the more conventional 90 minutes”, Hokken concludes. •
Measuring truth is a fraught process and should be a source of anxiety for documentary makers. There may be narrative truth to events in real time, but this is not the same as the narrative logic of a film. Truth telling is often the speech of hysterics; common truths might be closer to clichés; and those claiming to be in possession of truth invariably turn out to be self-serving manipulators or even worse, liars. Embarking on my first feature documentary in 2000, Hoover Street Revival, I cut a text out of a magazine and stuck it in my notebook: “Any documentary, mine or anyone else’s, in no matter what style, is arbitrary, biased, prejudiced, compressed and subjective” (Fred Wiseman). Our thinking as filmmakers is critical. So make a friend of doubt and self-doubt. Find your pole-stars in the guiding thoughts of others in whatever form – images, words or music. Listen for the fragments of poetry that return and insist “this is a special way of being afraid no trick dispels, religion used to try, that vast moth-earth brocade created to pretend we never die…” (Larkin). Browsing further through my early note book, I stumble on another handwritten scribble attributed to no one : “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically….” As a filmmaker, I am a witness. I operate in uncertainty. I measure truth in details. Words do not always hold their meaning, but I felt something here in this moment that I can trust, in the shape that person’s body made, its relationship to another. The gaze here in this man’s eye that addresses the camera; he will challenge the audience as he challenges me. It’s impossible to say exactly how or why. •
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CAFEDEJAREN.NL Written and directed by Aboozar Amini
Producer: Jia Zhao/Silk Road Film Salon, NL Co-producers: Ken-ichi Imamura/NHK Enterprise, Japan Eva Blondiau, Color of May, Germany Sarah Hilmandi/KinoKabul, Afghanistan
VANAF 24 JANUARI 2019 IN DE FILMTHEATERS
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NPO Fund is proud to support the following film screenings at IDFA: #pestverhaal 180cc Bellingcat - Truth in a Post-Truth World But Now Is Perfect Good Neighbours Lenno & the Angelfish L I S T E N The Man Who Looked Beyond the Horizon ‘Now something is slowly changing’ Outside In Skip and the Rhythm Rangers You Are My Friend PL AN TA www.npo-fonds.nl G
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Firm foundation for the IDFA Bertha Fund
Freedom Fields
Inside IDFA
These are boom times for the IDFA Bertha Fund (IBF). Geoffrey Macnab talks to IBF manager Isabel Arrate Fernandez about securing the Fund’s future The IBF, which has supported over 600 projects over the last 20 years, has now secured €1.2 million in financing from social and economic justice organisation the Bertha Foundation for the period 2019-2021. This strengthens yet further the partnership, which began in 2013, between IBF and the Bertha Foundation and which has now led to investment in 166 documentary projects from 80 countries, 74 of which have been completed. Fund manager Isabel Arrate is understandably in upbeat mood on the eve of this year’s festival. “It has been a very nice and fruitful collaboration,” Arrate says of the union between IDFA and Bertha. “Both organisations have common ground with regard to goals.” Another crucial point about the Bertha backing is that it frees IBF from its dependence on the whims of the Fund’s previous backer, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministry was always keen to help the Fund but, when money was tight, supporting artists and freedom of artistic expression in developing countries was never one of its key priorities. At Wednesday’s opening of IDFA, new artistic director Orwa Nyrabia announced a collaboration between the Netherlands Film Fund and IDFA Bertha fund. “As of 2019, they will launch the NFF+IBF Co-production Scheme, and every year two projects will receive a production grant of 50,000 Euros each,” Arrate says. “Projects that have received support through one of the other IDFA Bertha Fund funding schemes are eligible, and the grants are made available through Dutch producers getting involved as minority co-producers. We see this as not only a great opportunity for our IBF grantees, but also as a continuation of the work IDFA and the Netherlands Film Fund have been doing creating opportunities for Dutch producers to participate in the international market.” Winning ways
“Art comes at the bottom, particularly when it comes to finding funding”, Arrate makes a familiar observation about government agencies and their priorities. Before Bertha became involved, the Fund (previously known as the Jan Vrijman Fund) had faced constant financial problems. “For
us, [the Bertha backing] was crucial. It came at a moment when we didn’t know if we would be able to continue.” There were stages, Arrate remembers of the pre-2013 period, when IDFA wasn’t even sure whether salaries could be paid and the Fund’s offices kept open. Now, though, IBF-backed films – among them Last Men in Aleppo and Return to Homs – are winning Oscar nominations and Sundance awards. “This gives us great pleasure and reassurance”, new IDFA director Orwa Nyrabia says of the turnaround in the Fund’s fortunes. Nyrabia knows IBF from the inside, having produced Return to Homs. The Fund also supported another of his earlier films, Dolls – A Woman from Damascus, directed by Diana El Jeiroudi, and he has served on the festival’s jury. Co-production and distribution
IBF doesn’t demand much in return for its investment in a film. “We ask for the Dutch premiere of the film or we ask for the right to propose that the film have its Dutch premiere at IDFA. If IDFA rejects the film, then obviously people are free to go where they like”, Arrate explains. The festival will also ask for rights to show the film on the IDFA TV platform – but it won’t insist on this if this would jeopardise other deals producers may already have made. Alongside its ‘IBF Classic’ investments in project development, production and post-production, the Fund also offers international co- production and distribution grants through its EU Creative Europe-backed IDFA Bertha Fund Europe. There are 10 films supported by IBF in this year’s IDFA selection: a smaller crop than normal. “Usually, we have 15 or 16”, Arrate says. She puts this down to chance – there were only 18 films finished in time for the deadline. Even so, she is very happy with the quality of the films that are screening, which include IDFA’s opening film, Kabul, City in the Wind by Aboozar Amini. “We gave them a coproduction grant this year. They really rushed to finish the film,” Arrate recalls. Also screening is Dead Souls by Wang Bing, which Arrate describes as a “remarkable, super strong film by a very strong author.” A grim story of purges, hard labour and starvation in 1950s China, the documentary had its premiere in Cannes and is one of the longest films screening at IDFA this year, coming in at a staggering 495 minutes.
Female football
An unlikely trend is for IBF-backed films focusing on women’s football. Two have been selected for IDFA this year (Libya-based Freedom Fields by Naziha Arebi and Ukrainian director Alisa Kovalenko’s Home Games), and another is reportedly in the pipeline. Arrate points to the strength of applications now being received from Latin America. Chilean Los Reyes (sold by Cat & Docs) is one feature doc that has already been generating a buzz in advance of its IDFA world premiere. There is also a notably strong presence from China at this year’s festival. “It’s something we see happening in the applications to the Fund. There is a lot happening in China”, Arrate notes. She and one of her colleagues travelled to China earlier this year, attending a pitching event near Shanghai and spending a few days in Beijing. “On the one hand, [China] seems like it is opening up, but this opening up is very controlled and you never know when the rules will change”, she observes. New goals
Alongside the films in selection, IBF has four projects at the IDFA Forum: Iranian director Mehrdad Oskouei’s The Revisited (about Iranian girls imprisoned for killing their abusive fathers); Hemal Trivedi’s Indian-set The Half Truths; Nino Orjonikidze and Vano Arsenishvili’s The Platform and Marianela Maldonado’s Children of Las Brisas. IDFA Bertha Fund currently has an overall budget of €800,000 a year – a relatively limited amount, which Arrate and her team have been able to stretch surprisingly far through their ingenuity and hard work. They’re hoping for further financing that will allow them to pursue a number of new goals. One idea being floated is for a ‘new media’ fund. Another is for IBF to re-introduce support for festivals. “They are these little paths, small things that, if we were able to do it, would complete the scope of our ambition, of what we think it is viable to do”, Arrate says. •
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IDFA Talks and live events In IDFA’s Doc Talks, filmmakers and sometimes protagonists enter into in-depth discussions about their working methods, artistic choices and thought processes. The Filmmaker Talks focus in on renowned documentarians and their oeuvres. IDFA on Stage presents surprising, unique events with a documentary twist. See the IDFA website or app for details of all the Talks and live events.
IDFA on Stage
Doc Talks
In the program IDFA on Stage we present for the first time four unique performances that explore the space between documentary film and performing arts. Dziga Vertov’s fully restored Anniversary of the Revolution (1918) is brought back to life in Tuschinski 1, with a live classical score that calls forth the year of the revolution into the present. This project is an initiative of the Russian film historian Nikolai Izvolov in collaboration with the film and photo archive in Krasnogorsk. The festive world premiere will take place on Tuesday, November 20th. Additionally, IDFA on Stage presents three contemporary immersive projects; the full program is now available online.
A large number of IDFA screenings are followed by an extensive talk with the filmmaker and sometimes also protagonists. A sample of the wide-ranging subjects of these Doc Talks:
IDFA on Stage: Nature’s Nickelodeons How can the nature documentary escape from the framework of the big, or small screen? In this performance, curator Amy Cutler sets out to hack the language and content of this genre. She is aided by a group of experimental artists from a wide range of disciplines, including beatboxer Jason Singh, synth musician Bridget Hayden, harpist Serafina Steer and the Genetic Choir’s instant composers. They take their inspiration from various largely forgotten practices, in which rather than being a TV event, the nature documentary was a group experience—such as an abandoned idea of Walt Disney’s to put cinemas for these documentaries in zoos. In their adaptations of old nature docs, they create new heroes and villains, question the familiar anthropomorphic storylines, and give new meaning to classic sounds and images. How does the film of a spider spinning its web change when it’s accompanied by subtle chords on the harp? Join a series of exciting live performances on a journey to submerged volcanoes, bioluminescence, swarming insects, and many other eccentrics, outliers and oddities.
Oxfam Novib Selection: Hamada + Doc Talk Director Eloy Domínguez Serén made a portrait of the friends Sidahmed, Zahra and Lafdal, who live in a refugee camp in Western Sahara, separated from the rest of the world by minefields and a Moroccan wall. They belong to the Sahrawi, a forgotten people who have been living in refugee camps for decades. After the screening, journalist Clarice Gargard talks with Michiel Servaes (Executive Director Oxfam Novib) and the director of this vital, beautifully filmed portrait.
Filmmaker Talks
Helena Třeštíková Highly experienced filmmaker Helena Třeštíková, Guest of Honour at IDFA 2018, is a household name in Eastern Europe, but little known in the rest of the world. Třeštíková is an author with an extremely authentic style who follows her characters over very long periods – often more than 10 years. Alongside a retrospective of her work, Třeštíková is compiling her her Top 10 favourite documentaries for IDFA, which she will present in this Filmmaker Talk, moderated by film journalist Pamela Cohn. Fri 16 13:00 Tuschinski 1
Other Filmmaker Talks include Amos Gitai, Audrius Stonys, Maria Ramos and Nicolas Philibert.
Absence + Doc Talk After the screening of Absence, film journalist Nicolas Rapold (Film Comment) speaks with director Ekta Mittal about Indian labor migrants who leave for the big city and never return home. The representation of space plays an important role in making the emptiness and grief of those left behind palpable. Sat 17 16:30 EYE Cinema 2
Thu 15 18:45 Tuschinski 1
Bye Bye Africa + Doc Talk After the screening of Bye Bye Africa, film journalist Nicolas Rapold (Film Comment) talks extensively with Mahamat Saleh Haroun. In this hybrid film, the director, played by himself, returns to Chad for the first time in years when his mother dies. There, he’s confronted with a society in which national film culture is marginalized, and the dividing line between fiction and reality seems increasingly blurred.
Serialized: America to Me + Doc Talk The student population at a large school in Chicago implies that equal education means equal opportunities, but with this series about twelve students from different backgrounds, director Steve James shows a grimmer picture. The students speak frankly about friendship, prejudice, institutional racism, privileges, and their dreams about how things can—and must—be improved. Afterwards there will be a conversation with James about his series and the American dream, which unfortunately is not yet within everyone’s reach. Sun 18 10:00 Ketelhuis Zaal 1
Doc Talks in IDFA’s focus programs This year, IDFA homes in on the autobiographical documentary in its focus program Me, while the Space program investigates the use of space in documentaries. One of the major components of these focus programs are extensive discussions with the filmmakers. A sample of the wide-ranging subjects of these Doc Talks: Embracing & Katatsumori & Birth/Mother + Doc Talk After the screening of her three short documentaries, director Naomi Kawase talks extensively with film programmer Julian Ross. Kawase started her career as a photographer and made the switch to film with two short films in which she focused on her own adoption. In Embracing and Katatsumori, she studies her childhood, in which she was adopted by a great-aunt. In Birth / Mother, which she made more than 10 years later, she again focuses the camera on herself when she becomes a mother herself. Sun 18 12:30 EYE Cinema 1
Room for a Man + Doc Talk After the screening of Room for a Man, director Anthony Chidiac talks with Alisa Lebow, reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. The first thing Anthony Chidiac tells about himself is that life frightens him, and the outside world feels hostile, partly because he’s gay. Through conversations with his mother and the Syrian builders who are renovating his house and a trip with his father to Argentina, Chidiac constructs an intriguing self-portrait. Fri 16 15:00 Tuschinski 2
Fri 16 18:15 EYE Cinema 2
Piazzolla, the Years of the Shark + Live: Carel Kraayenhof The Argentinean bandoneonist and composer Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) was a great innovator of tango. For this film, Piazzolla’s son Daniel draws from the family’s private collection. Rare footage of numerous performances and intimate home videos, supplemented with archival material, sketch a lively portrait of Piazzolla: bold, confident, passionate, and a virtuoso pure and simple. Prior to the film, bandoneonist Carel Kraayenhof and pianist Juan Pablo Dobal pay tribute to the master. IDFA in Carré is made possible by the BankGiro Lotterij. Sun 18 21:00 Carré
Victory Day + Doc Talk After the screening of Victory Day, film journalist Nicolas Rapold (Film Comment) speaks with director Sergei Loznitsa. In his distinctive style, he records the celebration of Victory Day (May 9) at the Russian war memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park. In this place, innocent nostalgia and contemporary nationalism become one. Sun 18 16:45 EYE Cinema 2
In the Open + Doc Talk After the screening of In the Open, film journalist Nicolas Rapold (Film Comment) speaks with director Guillaume Massart. In his film, Massart documents sex offenders who are serving out their sentences in an open prison in Corsica. What begins as an observational film about a prison without walls and barbed wire becomes an in-depth search for what it means to be a perpetrator and a victim. Sun 18 19:45 EYE Cinema 2
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Camorra Feature-Length Competition
Francesco Patierno’s Camorra, selected for the Feature-length competition (and completed in less than six months), culls the RAI archives to document the proliferation of organised crime in Naples over the past half century. The Camorra system is not like Mafia-organised crime, the film underlines – at least it wasn’t initially. Initially, the business of smuggling, profiteering and extortion was a route out of poverty for Neopolitans, and also proved beneficial to the central government, who turned a blind eye to illegal activity as it meant there was less need to redirect financial resources to alleviating social deprivation. Inevitably, however, control over the city’s crime was claimed by feuding criminal concerns, such as Marseilles and Sicilian gangsters, but the foot soldiers within the ongoing illegal business remained the city’s poor, often its youth. In archive footage from the 1960s to 1990s (much of which had been neither edited nor previously broadcast), beautiful fresh-faced youths speak openly about their violent criminal
activity and the miserable conditions of their upbringing. “In many southern societies in Italy, the boundary between what is legal and what is illegal is very, very thin,” director Patierno underlines, adding that “in our society violence is used by organised crime as a means of control.” Eventually, a Neopolitan godfather/saviour emerges in the form of mild-mannered, suave and dapper Raffaele Cutolo, a latter-day ‘Robin Hood’ lionised by Naples’ poor, despite spending the majority of his adult life behind bars. The film tells us how, under his assumed leadership, the Camorra gave the city’s youth “a flag, and something to believe in.” The final third of the film is dedicated to the mobster, especially his role in the 1981 release of city planning official Ciro Cirillo after his kidnapping and trial by the Red Brigades. Patierno is also a Neopolitan who retains a particular kinship to the city and its folk. “Naples is a strange city because somehow there is always a mix of good people, bad people, rich people and poor people. [Within] so many areas of the city you need
Survivors Pastor and filmmaker Arthur Pratt showed his new documentary Survivors in Sierra Leone for the first time just before IDFA, and was delighted with the response. Ebola survivors, victims’ relatives, aid agency representatives and political organisations (even the British High Commissioner) were in attendance. “The hall was jam-packed. It was quite an emotional thing for many people,” Pratt says. “The response was good. People were asking to take the film all over the country.” Survivors gives an intimate, insider’s view of the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone in 2014. Its perspective is markedly different from that of Western news agencies reporting on yet another African tragedy. During the crisis, Pratt had been filming for NHK Japan and Tangled Bank Studios. His footage was also used by Al Jazeera and the BBC. But he was dismayed at the tone of much of the coverage. “They just want to portray us in a particular light – just continuing to portray us as these backward people who don’t know what we are doing.” Pratt was also frustrated that so much reporting was from the international aid workers’ point of view. He contacted producer and co-director Banker White and told him he was determined to shoot his own film on the crisis, showing Sierra Leoneans tackling their problems themselves rather than relying on foreign aid. The filmmakers decided early on the film would “exclude” all members of the political elite. “When you get such people inside your story, your story becomes political in a way,”
he says. “We decided to follow ordinary people on the ground – ambulance drivers, nurses and some people who had been infected.” Pratt and his wife also feature in the film. She was pregnant at the time, and the government shut down all the private hospitals. He was keen to show how the Ebola crisis had affected those with other medical needs. “It was very emotional for me,” Pratt says of the shooting period. Sometimes, he asked himself if he had the right to depict such suffering on camera. However, the film remains discreet and respectful. Pratt is almost certainly the only filmmaker at IDFA this year who is a pastor as well
to be aware of the contradiction and the social context… I was brought up in a middle-class family, but there was part of me that is very close to the world I portray in the film.” Most pointedly, he argues both at the film’s beginning and end that the reason for the rise of the Neopolitan Camorra was the citizens’ inability to bring about coherent and effective proletarian revolution at any time in their history, and that subsequent acceptance of miserable social conditions became “an addiction”. This is underlined by much archive footage of the poor within their slums, and the armies of potential child recruits. It was the ruling class, Patierno points out, that successfully set out to control and exploit this sense of disorder. • By Nick Cunningham
Fri 16 15:45 Tuschinski 3 (P&I); Sun 18 18:15 Tuschinski 1; Wed 21 20:00 Munt 11; Thu 22 17:30 Tuschinski 6; Fri 23 November 11:00; Munt 10; Sat 24 17:15 Munt 11
Frontlight
as a documentary director. “I always use filmmaking as a tool for helping people in their lives,” Pratt states. He didn’t go to film school but started as a “guerrilla filmmaker”, learning his craft on the job and by attending filmmaking workshops. Survivors has been sold to ITVS in the US and the aim now is to secure further TV deals in Europe. Pratt is keen for the film to be shown in colleges and hospitals and is planning community screenings in Sierra Leone, and to take it to Liberia and Guinea as well as to Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. He is planning a new documentary, The Curiosity Project, looking at the “concept of identity and blackness from the point of
view of an African and of an African-American” after being shocked by the racism and extremism he encountered when visiting the US in 2016. “The slave trade divided us in one way. Now, modern concepts of identity and ethnicity have also divided us,” he reflects on the complex relationship between Africans and African-Americans. “We cannot harness our own true unity, our own true power and see how we can help each other.” • By Geoffrey Macnab
Fri 16 17:45 Munt 10; Sun 18 22:15 Tuschinski 3; Tue 20 13:30 Munt 10; Thu 22 15:15 Munt 12
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Opening Film / First Appearance / IBF
Frontlight / Amsterdam Human Rights Award
Kabul, City Police in the Wind Killing
“I had been researching police lethality and the justice system since 2008,” Natasha Neri, co-director with Lula Carvalho of IDFA’s Frontlight selection and Amsterdam Human Rights Award contender Police Killing, says ahead of the film’s international premiere at IDFA on Thursday. “We found that homicides committed by on-duty police officers are usually taken for granted as legitimate defense [‘Auto de Resistência’ in Portuguese, hence the film’s original title] and 98% of cases are dismissed without being solved. We in Brazil have the deadliest police in the world.”
Dutch-Afghan director Aboozar Amini’s IDFA opening film world premiering at IDFA Kabul, City in the Wind was shot across the Afghan capital over three years from 2015, one of the deadliest periods in the country’s recent history. But viewers don’t see a single frame of violence on the big screen. Amini has chosen instead to focus on the human side of Kabul through the personal stories of loquacious bus driver Abbas, whose happy-go-lucky exterior conceals a darker side, and resilient young brothers Afshin and Benjamin, who somehow manage to retain a childish sense of fun in the shadow of never-ending danger. “I made 15 trips to Kabul. Every time I was there I was lucky to survive one or two suicide bomb incidents. All I could do was just follow some basic security measures, like the ones Afshin’s father advises in the film: avoid crowded areas and don’t go to see when something has happened because these are the moments when suicide bombers will explode themselves,” Amini recounts. “In July 2016 I was present at the big demonstration in Deh Mazang Square when two big suicide bombs were detonated, killing 86 people and injuring 400. I saw violence. I saw half of a person’s body, or a head only… people I knew. People who had been shouting for peace the whole morning. It was horrible. This was the moment I have decided not to show any form of violence in my film.” The director produced the documentary through his Silk Road Film Salon company with Dutch-Chinese producer Jia Zhao. The Amsterdam-based production house focuses on stories and cross-regional film production along the ancient Silk Roads trade route connecting East and
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West, which also ran through Afghanistan. Amini, who now lives mainly in the Netherlands, says his split cultural identity and childhood memories of life in Afghanistan inform all his work. “I have spent more than half of my life in Europe; in a way I’m more European than Afghan. But I remember my childhood very clearly. A time my Afghanistan was shattered by war. I remember the two big Buddhas blown up in my hometown of Bamiyan by the Taliban,” Amini recalls. “I have this unique cultural background with a country which has been at war for the past 40 years, plus the right education in Europe. It would be a pity if I left it on a shelf and did nothing about it. There are many good filmmakers who work in Europe and make very good films, but none of them has the precious access to the topics and locations I have.” Amini is now working on a low budget hybrid film called Ways to Run, spinning off Kabul, City in the Wind, and Cineaste, a Scheherazade-inspired fiction feature about a cinema lover condemned to death by the Taliban for running a small screening room, but who staves off his execution by showing them a new film every day. • By Melanie Goodfellow
Thu 15 November 10:00 Compagnie, Grote Zaal (IDFAcademy); Thu 15 November 16:00 Munt 11; Fri 16 13:00 Munt 12 (P&I); Sat 17 November 12:45 Munt 11; Tue 20 11:15 EYE Cinema 2; Thu 22 9:55 Tuschinski 1 (VPRO Review); Sat 24 10:00 Tuschinski 1 (de Volkskrant-dag); Sat 24 November 13:30 Ketelhuis Zaal 1; Sun 25 16:00 Brakke Grond Grote Zaal
This alarming situation seems set to become even worse following the election of Brazil’s new president Bolsonaro. “Jair Bolsonaro supports a legislative proposal that could give policemen the right to shoot to kill armed people without a need to investigate these deaths,” Neri says. “And Rio’s future governor wishes to buy drones armed with guns for use in police interventions in favelas. So we are greatly concerned about the impact on the residents of favelas and on human rights defenders, who may now be considered terrorists by the new government”, she adds. Police Killing brings home the deadly everyday reality of excessive police force in Rio’s favelas through direct cinema-style filming and the use of cell phone footage from both witnesses and victims. “In 2015, the case of Chauan and Alan – who filmed his own death on his cell phone – brought the problem of police killings into the public eye,” Neri recalls. “Chauan was arrested and accused of having shot at the police, until the video proved he was actually the victim.” Events frequently played into the hands of the filmmakers – often tragically and occasionally more positively – during the long process of making the documentary. “The Costa Barros Massacre, where five youths were killed when police shot their car 111 times, took place one month after we started shooting,” Neri recalls. “We rushed to the Institute of Legal Medicine right away, where we met the five families and started following each step they took, from the cemetery to the investigations and hearings.” On a more positive note, a Parliamentary Commission to investigate police killings was instigated at Rio’s State Assembly during the first month of filming, providing a slightly more positive counterpoint to the ongoing carnage on the streets. Whether this will have any effect remains to be seen, however. “Unfortunately, police and state violence have risen to five homicides a day in the state of Rio now; over 1,180 people have been killed from January to September this year, so our film has only gained in urgency”, the director says. Neri is now working on a couple of new documentary projects. “I’m researching torture of detainees and working on some projects related to incarcerated people. I also have a project I wish to shoot next year on the rights of young, poor black people going to the beach in wealthy areas of Rio. We usually have massive arrests of favela residents on their way to the beach on public transport in the summer, and unfortunately we feel this will worsen next year.” • By Mark Baker Thu 15 18:45 Munt 12; Sat 17 10:15 Tuschinski 2; Tue 20 15:15 Brakke Grond Grote Zaal; Thu 22 17:30 Munt 12; Sun 25 12:45 Tuschinski 5
Standing at a crossroads
Yorinde Segal, Isabel Arrate Fernandez and Laurien ten Houten Photo: Roger Cremers
Melanie Goodfellow talks to IDFA’s industry departments about the state of play in the documentary world in challenging but exciting times Some 3,000 documentary industry professionals will touch down at IDFA during the festival to buy and sell films, develop, finance or scope out upcoming projects, network and connect, and in some cases simply touch base with the market and its latest developments and trends. They are all navigating a documentary industry in flux. As digital disrupter Netflix continues its love affair with the genre, driving up competition for hot titles, traditional broadcasters are still struggling to connect with the smartphone generation, while veteran filmmakers who built their reputations on creative features conceived for the big screen are increasingly experimenting with the documentary series format. Sea-change These are just some of the trends, developments and challenges of the times that will come to the fore, and perhaps collide, over the coming days across IDFA’s industry-focused initiatives and sidebars, topped by Docs for Sale, the Forum and the Industry Programme of talks, panels and think-tanks around current issues facing the documentary sector. “It’s definitely a time of sea-change. It’s a challenging environment for everyone”, comments Isabel Arrate Fernandez, managing director of the IDFA Bertha Fund. Fernandez, Docs for Sale coordinator Laurien ten Houten and Forum coordinator Yorinde Segal are collectively holding the fort this edition for long-time industry office head Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen, as she is not yet fully recovered from surgery. “A discussion we’ve had a lot this year, especially with the arrival of Orwa is, what is IDFA’s role and place in all this? We don’t see ourselves as having all the answers or solutions, but rather feel our role is to facilitate discussion by connecting people and getting them to talk to one another. We stand at the crossroads.”
Five themes As ever, IDFA’s Industry Programme covers a wide range of topics across the documentary production and distribution chain. To help professional guests navigate its various events, these have now been grouped under five themes: Documentary in Demand, looking at digital-era topics such as SVOD and Blockchain; Shifting Paradigms exploring the changing landscape of documentary; the heritage and archivefocused Diamonds are Forever; Rehearsing the Future, devoted to interactive and immersive storytelling, and finally the filmmaker-focused Among Filmmakers. Celebrated French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert will kick off the latter set of talks on Thursday, 15 November, followed by conversations with IDFA Guest of Honour Helena Třeštíková and Amos Gitai on Friday, 16 November. Other industry sessions in the first two days of the festival include a presentation of Good Pitch bodies around the world hosted by Doc Society and an industry session entitled Recipes for Interactivity, on how to present interactive documentaries, games, audio walks or augmented reality experiences to an audience. Inclusion and collaboration A number of sessions feed into IDFA’s new inclusivity drive on gender and geography, such as a talk entitled Code of Conduct: Towards an Ethical Way of Co-producing, looking at fairer ways to structure co-production deals, and Creating Inclusive Realities, which looks at inclusion and diversity within immersive storytelling. Other highlights later on in the festival include a talk by US filmmaker Steve James and French director Claire Simon on their experiences making their respective serialised documentaries America to Me and The Village. The programme also includes a number of network events such as the IDFA Producers’ Network meeting on Saturday, bringing producers and country representatives together to discuss potential collaborations. “It’s the second time we’ve done it,” says Segal. “It takes place over the course of a day. After meetings in the morning, there is a networking lunch and then the idea is that the participants attend the Code of Conduct: Towards an Ethical Way of Co-producing talk.”
Docs for Sale IDFA’s Docs for Sale market opens its doors for business on Friday 16 November at its long-term home in Arti et Amicitiae. More than 300 buyers, sales agents, distributors and festival programmers are expected to participate in the market, showcasing around 450 new titles on its online streaming platform. Ten Houten observes an uptick in Asian – in particular Chinese – attendance this year, with newcomers including commissioning editors Tencent News, China’s biggest online news platform with 300 million active users, and sales agent at Beijing-based film sales company Rediance Jing Xu, handling sales on IDFA’s opening film Kabul, City in the Wind. Other market Docs for Sale debutants from Asia include Albert Yao at Taiwanese distributor Swallow Wings Films. “It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what’s driving the increase in Chinese professionals,” Ten Houten says, noting there is also a strong Chinese presence in the festival line-up this year. “It’s probably a combination of things: the world is opening up and China is more accessible than it has been in the past. IDFA has also been working for some time with partners and scouts in China.” Ten Houten also notes that the range of nationalities attending this year is slightly broader overall, and that a record 15 national delegations are attending this year, including from Brazil, the Czech Republic, Palestine, the US and West Africa. Joining forces For the second year running, Docs for Sale will be joining forces with the Forum for a theatrical screening of seven rough cut projects, on Sunday 18 November. Productions in the showcase include Renzo Martens’ Congo-shot A Gentrification Program and Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche’s Advocate, about Israeli human rights lawyer Lea Tsemel who has spent her 50-year career defending Palestinians. Ten Houten also highlights the fact that all titles in IDFA’s Feature-Length Documentary, Dutch and First Appearance competitions will get big screen industry screenings this year prior to going on Docs for Sale’s online professional viewing platform. •
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Life in film Guest of Honour Helena Třeštíková talks about her IDFA Top 10 “Choosing the 10 most important films of my life is a beautiful but challenging task,” IDFA’s Guest of Honour 2018, Czech director Helena Třeštíková says. “Since being given it, I have been thinking about my favourites and watching my life flash before my eyes.” Even as a child I was an avid film buff. I went to the cinema as often as I could, as we didn’t have a television. One day, at the age of 14, an earth-shaking experience came along: I saw Something Different (O necem jinem, 1963) and it was like being struck by lightning. Part documentary, part live-action film, reality and narrative fiction come together and the whole thing is utterly truthful – as opposed to most Czech films of the time, which stuck to the mandatory canon of ‘Socialist cinematography’ and portray characters not true to life in the least. I also saw the film as a powerful infiltration of freedom into our vapid little world. The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko, 1967) was another key film in my life. A local fire station ball in a small Czech town: the drabbest characters imaginable create an allegory of society before our eyes. Italian film mogul Carlo Ponti took part in the project as a co-producer. When he saw the final product, he was horrified and wanted his money back, saying the movie ridiculed the common man. Its director, Miloš Forman, was charged with misappropriation of funds and faced 10 years’ imprisonment. Luckily, French director François Truffaut found out about the movie and he and some colleagues bought it and gave Ponti his money back. But, no sooner than it was completed, the film was banned in Czechoslovakia. Then the Prague Spring came along, official censorship ended and the film could be seen – though not for long. After the arrival of the Soviet tanks, censorship returned for 20 years. It’s interesting to note that both Communists and a big capitalist producer alike were so vexed by an honest glimpse of life. In 1969, my dream became reality: I enrolled at the film and television academy of Czechoslovakia, FAMU, and eagerly devoured every movie they showed us in the history of documentary film class. In Farrebique – The Four Seasons (1946), Georges Rouquier observes a family of farmers in the French countryside over the course of a year. It’s the normal lives of normal people that fascinate me – the ordinary, the everyday. No artificial stories or fabricated drama. I said to myself, ‘now that’s documentary filmmaking!’ The Seine Meets Paris (1957) is a cinematic poem with beautiful camerawork and wonderfully selected music by Joris Ivens, based on a screenplay by Jacques Prévert. I’ve seen other films by Ivens such as Borinage, but I found him to be more powerful as a poet than as an activist. The half-dramatized The Savage Eye (1960) captivated me with its splendid portrayal of 1950s America. As a student, this was a film that made me think about how the possibilities of documentary film are limitless, and that it would be beautiful to spend my whole life investigating them! I finished school and was cast out into the real world, looking for myself and my place in filmmaking. Our world at the time was very confined by the political dynasty of one party, there was heavy censorship, the borders were closed, foreign documentaries were not shown. It was a little Czech pond with no great horizons. And that became my theme: the ordinary little lives around me. I got the idea to observe these everyday stories over a longer period. I found the theme of my life’s work: longitudinal documentary. There was not a lot going on in Czech cinema after the Soviet occupation, but from time to time something extraordinary came out. Prague: The Restless Heart of Europe (Praha – neklidne srdce Evropy, 1984) is part of a series of films about important world metropolises shot by prominent directors. Věra Chytilová was a brilliant filmmaker, and she handled the topic in a unique way. Together with the
superb cinematographer Jan Malíř and editor Alois Fišárk, she created a fascinating poem about Prague. In the process, an exceptionally vibrant film was made during a time of political stagnation, which was absurd, really. It also took a while before it could be shown. Chytilová’s film could be seen as a textbook example of the possibilities allowed by film language and expressing oneself specifically through film. In 1989, our lives changed. The Communist regime collapsed, free elections came, censorship ended and the borders were opened. We all took in a breath of air, and filmmakers looked for new themes. In 1992, I was present for the historic meeting where director Pavel Koutecký told then-president Václav Havel he would like to follow him with a camera for 10 years. Havel agreed, clearing the way for one of the most noteworthy long-term film projects on a protagonist who was a politician in office, Citizen Havel (Obcan Havel, 2008). He allows himself to be filmed in situations where other politicians would immediately shoo a filmmaker away. He gave Koutecký and his crew his full trust. Part of the agreement was that the film would only be released five years after the president’s term in office expired. Tragically, the director died just as the film was in its final stages and it was completed by his colleague, Miroslav Janek, in 2007. I think that no one will ever make such an open film about a politician and his times again. The world opened up to us and I looked for projects from other countries similar to what I was trying to do. I came across the project 7 Up by Michael Apted, and all kinds of variations on the format. I was most taken by the Russian one, Born in the USSR. Director Sergei Miroshnichenko took the 7 Up format, observing a group of about 15 children for seven years at seven-year intervals. In this Russian variation, all of the children were born as citizens of the Soviet Union, but the USSR broke up into individual countries a few years after the start of filming. It is fascinating to watch the very different fates of the children. In this case, major historical events heavily impacted the minor stories of human fortunes. I admire Krzysztof Kieślowski’s project First Love (Pierwsza milosc, 1974), in which he spends a year observing an average young couple expecting a child. Kieślowski originally wanted to follow them for a longer period, but ended the project after a year. I read that he was concerned about how filming any longer would affect the young couple’s lives. At the same time, I was filming a similar topic, originally a 15-minute project entitled The Miracle (1975), and I went on to observe the family for another 37 years, giving rise to the film Private Universe (2012). Like Kieślowski, I pondered the issue of the how the film might influence their lives, but I reached the conclusion that there was no danger as long as the rules of ethics between the director and the protagonists were adhered to. This is an important issue in documentary filmmaking. I am a little disappointed that I will never find out what became of that young couple. Nonetheless, the film First Love is an example of Kieślowski’s amazing sensitivity as a filmmaker and of his skill, which he continued to refine in his narrative films. In Slovakia, I was struck by the work of a young and utterly original director, Peter Kerekes. In 66 Seasons (66 sezón, 2003), the public swimming pool in Košice becomes a metaphor for life. Birth, death, love, attraction and hatred, all reflected in a fascinating form of filmmaking without ever even leaving the pool and environs. I consider this a beautiful example of inventiveness in filmmaking, imaginativeness in direction and walking a tightrope in editing. For me, it is something of a textbook for the opportunities of using film language in a documentary. I am fretting over my selection, thinking maybe I could have been more specific. There are a number of films I’ve missed, and lots of things I’ve forgotten. But I’ve known for a long time that perfection is unattainable, and I will always fret… •
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