IDFA Special 2014/2 (English) by IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

special industry

INCLUDING SCHEDULE

SAT 22 & SUN 23 NOV

For more news & full industry programme, see www.idfa.nl/industry

Laura Poitras photo: Corinne de Korver

World Citizen American filmmaker Laura Poitras has touched down at IDFA with her US state surveillance, whistle-blower documentary CitizenFour screening in Of Media and Men. By Melanie Goodfellow “I come out of a cinema tradition. I like putting people in the theatre and that collective experience. It’s been great to have the film screening in multiple countries and get people going to the movies. It makes me very happy,” says Poitras, who has been touring the globe over the past two months with the film. One country Poitras will not be returning too anytime soon, however, is the UK, in spite of rave reviews for the film and a positive response from the general public there. Poitras and fellow journalist Glen Greenwald angered the UK government by revealing material deemed as sensitive to state security when they published some of the information handed to them by National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden. “I have been advised not to travel to the UK because there is less press freedom and press protection,” says Poitras. “It would be weird if they were to arrest me, but there’s the Terrorism Act, under which David Miranda was detained, and the Official Secrets Act.” Poitras notes that although it no longer looks like the US government is going to bring legal charges or subpoena her and Greenwald for breaking Snowden’s story, “There are still things to be afraid of. We’ve angered people in intelligence agencies. I don’t live by fear. I made that decision a long time ago, but I am aware we’ve made some enemies. I don’t have a bodyguard.

I think Glen got some security for his house in Rio. But there are things I do like I don’t put my house address on my emails. If someone’s going to meet me at my house, I’ll meet them elsewhere and take them back.” Talking about what lies ahead for Snowden, currently living in exile in Moscow, Poitras says she does not think it is where he wants to live long-term. “I wouldn’t be surprised if another country offered him asylum. Right now the political landscape is such that countries are worried to anger the US but that he has a lot of popular support. I am living in Berlin and he certainly has a lot of popular support in Germany,” Poitras says.

“I’m a filmmaker too” Since the release of CitizenFour, details of two fiction feature projects inspired by Snowden’s story have emerged, one spear-headed by Greenwald, the second by Oliver Stone. Poitras seems bemused by the projects: “I think it’s not easy to make contemporaneous fiction films about stories that are still happening, but I think it has been done. All The President’s Men was made very soon after the Watergate breakin. With Glen’s project, I’ve said I would be very supportive once they get a script together, but right now I’m focusing on my film. There is a bit of Hollywood that thinks it’s the only one who can tell a story, so I have to keep reminding that I’m a filmmaker too.”

Artistic Outreach Directors do not have to compromise artistic vision when making an issueled documentary with which they want to make a social impact was the message coming out of industry talk on Friday on how filmmakers can use outreach techniques to extend the life and reach of their work. Melanie Goodfellow reports

“The words ‘social impact’ and ‘social impact documentary’ can have horrible connotations. I think there is real prejudice and bias around the term. For many people, it might seem an unashamedly bias film, with shoddy journalism which isn’t the most creative or beautiful. I am here to tell you this is total bollocks and you can quote me on that,” said talk moderator Beadie Finzi of the BRITDOC Foundation, the UK body which helped pioneer the use of outreach techniques. “When we talk about impact distribution, we’re talking about a generation of filmmakers for whom one night on TV, or a week in the cinema, is not enough. They want to see their films put to work to go further, be it over weeks, over months or over years,” she continued. “They’re interested in collaborating with different types of partners and funders who can help them make that happen.” Norwegian producer Carsten Aanonsen of Indie Film revealed outreach plans for August B. Hanssen’s Ida’s Diary, capturing the life of a clinically depressed young woman with a history of self-harm through her video diary. He and the director want to coincide its broadcast across Scandinavia with World Mental Health Day on to October 10, 2015. “The idea is to show the film at festivals and build campaigns with partners such as mental

Ida’s Diary

health bodies to build an awareness campaigned aimed at schools,” said Aanonsen, revealing that they are also trying to tie up with MTV’s online platform. Other speakers at Friday’s talk included Nick Batzias of Australian Madman Entertainment, who produced Damon Gameau’s nutritionfocused work That Sugar Film and Joanna Natasegara, producer of Virunga, which has raced up the audience award chart at IDFA where it is playing in the Best of Fests section. The industry talk was part of a larger outreach programme at IDFA on Friday which included a workshop for a selection of Dutch and Norwegian projects which was a joint venture between IDFA, The Norwegian Film Institute, BRITDOC and the Netherlands Film Fund.

Guests Meet Guests 22/11/2014, 18:00 hours De Jaren Café Hosted by CNN Films 23/11/2014, 18:00 hours De Jaren Café Hosted by POLISH DOCS and HBO Europe

DOCS FROM FLANDERS @ IDFA 2014 WAITING FOR AUGUST

OUR CITY

ELEPHANT’S DREAM

THE FEMALE GAZE

PANORAMA

TEODORA ANA MIHAI CLIN D’OEUIL FILMS SALES RISE AND SHINE

PRODUCTION

SCREENINGS

22 NOV, 18:15, KLEINE KOMEDIE 26 NOV, 17:45 TUSCHINSKI 4

MARIA TARANTINO

BY KRISTOF

BILSEN ASSOCIATE DIRECTORS SALES CAT&DOCS

PRODUCTION

WILDUNDOMESTICATED SCREENINGS

SCREENINGS

23 NOV, 17:15, MUNT 9 25 NOV, 14:15, MUNT 10 27 NOV, 18:00, TUSCHINSKI 4 28 NOV, 12:00, EYE CINEMA 1

22 NOV, 16:15, MUNT 10 24 NOV, 22:45, TUSCHINSKI 4 25 NOV, 18:45, MUNT 12 27 NOV, 20:15, MUNT 13

BEFORE THE LAST CURTAIN FALLS

MING OF HARLEM TWENTY STOREYS IN THE AIR

dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y

NATHAN, FREE AS A BIRD

GLADIATORS, A DIFFERENT WORLD

BEST OF FESTS

PARADOCS

PANORAMA

FORUM PROJECT

BY EVA KÜPPER & THOMAS WALLNER CO-PRODUCTION (FLANDERS)

BY PHILLIP WARNELL CO-PRODUCTION (FLANDERS)

BY JOHAN GRIMONPREZ PRODUCTION ZAPOMATIC (1997)

BY ROEL NOLLET PRODUCTION REDHORSE REPORTERS SALES COCCINELLE FILM PLACEMENT

BY ARUNAS MATELIS CO-PRODUCTION (FLANDERS)

SCREENINGS

25 NOV, 15:10, ZUILENZAAL

SAVAGE FILM SALES CAT&DOCS SCREENINGS

24 NOV, 22:00, MUNT 11 26 NOV, 12:00, BRAKKE GROND 27 NOV, 18:30, TUSCHINSKI 6 28 NOV, 20:45 MELKWEG

MICHIGAN FILMS SCREENINGS

24 NOV, 18:00, TUSCHINSKI 5 28 NOV, 16:15, TUSCHINSKI 6

SCREENINGS

25 NOV, 19:15, TUSCHINSKI 6 28 NOV, 13:45, TUSCHINSKI 6

22 NOV, 12:15, MUNT 10 24 NOV, 13:30, TUSCHINSKI 4 27 NOV, 22:45, TUSCHINSKI 6

ASSOCIATE DIRECTORS

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Fundamental Issues

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Netherlands Film Fund (NFF) documentary consultant Pieter Fleury speaks about this year’s crop of Dutch films in IDFA selection, and also about ongoing Fund commitment to the sector. By Nick Cunningham

photo: Nichon Glerum

The 2014 IDFA DocLab opened for business on Thursday, November 20, with a dynamic smorgasbord of thought-provoking, interactive, immersive, shocking, cutting-edge, revelatory and disorientating installations, programmes and exhibits. IDFA’s New Media coordinator Caspar Sonnen commented: “We need

the space for experimentation, we need to have a place where it is ok to fail, or where it is ok to show stuff that we really don’t know how to show. Every year within Doclab we get all those kinds of questions that we try to answer.” Nick Cunningham

More than Amir festival Amir Labaki, director of the Brazilian It’s All True doc fest, is in Amsterdam not only to see films but also to bang the drum for his festival’s 20th edition in April 2015. By Nick Cunningham

Labaki’s reasons for founding the festival were many-fold, he says. “It was almost impossible to watch documentaries in Brazil in the early to mid 1990s. At that time, I was a film critic travelling around the world and it was obvious to me that a new trend of documentary film production was emerging – as a genre it was really growing at that moment.” IDFA was in its infancy then, as were other key events such as Yamagata, so nobody was certain how the sector would develop, nor if audiences would share the festivals’ passion for the genre. Neverthe-

less, the first It’s All True festival went ahead, opening with The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, a documentary about Sam Fuller directed by Adam Simon. A retrospective of the films of Santiago Alvarez was programmed and one of the international guests was IDFA’s Ally Derks. The next year, a competition was introduced and then, year on year, Labaki increasingly saw how his investment in the project was worth it. “Festivals like ours, IDFA and Yamagata began to prove that there is an audience ready to watch documentaries, and programming docs subsequently became easier in cinemas. There was a stigma against documentaries, but film fests like ours showed there was a real audience.” And then there’s the festival name,

photo: Felix Kalkman

inspired by Orson Welles’ unfinished ‘masterpiece’ about Rio. “Welles came to Brazil and tried to make his film, but he couldn’t finish it. The Americans called him back, cut his budget, took away the prints and he could never work on it again. When I was starting the festival two things happened. “In Berlin, I saw the documentary (also called It’s All True) about the Welles film and it was obvious that it was as important to Welles as Que Viva Mexico was to Eisenstein. And then Beatrice Welles, Orson’s daughter, came to Brazil in 1995 and I immediately thought of the festival title, to say thank you to Mr Welles because he came to Brazil to make a great film about my country – but also because it’s a great title for a festival. And Ally Derks agreed. When I told her she said, ‘That is the most perfect title. Bingo.’” “Internationally, we are a prestige documentary festival that takes place in Latin America, as well as the oldest one. We are not large, but we are very selective and screen about 100 titles every year, a third the number IDFA does. People know we are really devoted to creative documentaries and that we are important as the leading window for documentary in Latin America. I think that this is a fair assessment, the most devoted,” he said. “And I think we belong to the same band of brothers, from IDFA to Yamagata to CPH-Dox to HotDocs – a group of festivals supporting innovative work in non-fiction form, especially in film, and we are very proud to be in such a selective group, and proud that we have been able to do this for so long. For two decades. And the scene is so completely different. “Documentaries s are so much closer to everybody. Everybody is thinking about them, which wasn’t the same thing 20-25 years ago. They now hold a very important place in the culture of our times and I think that films festivals like It’s all True and IDFA played a very important role in this changing of minds.”

The Fund has supported 12 feature docs premiering in Amsterdam, including Heddy Honigmann’s festival opener Around the World in 50 Concerts and debutant Morgan Knibbe’s Those Who Feel the Fire Burning in main competition, as well as a slew of films in Dutch Competition, including Ineke Smits’ Stand by Your President. Morgan Knibbe was a Wildcard winner, which meant that on graduation he was given €40,000 by the Fund to shoot a film on any subject of his choosing (plus €7,000 in producer and director coaching fees). Wildcard filmmakers usually make their film for this amount but Knibbe used this as the basis for further financing – a practice the Fund is happy to go along with as long as the principle of creative freedom is not compromised. “The intention is to stimulate the filmmakers to go sky-high with their ideas without any limiting involvement from anybody else.” Ineke Smits’ Stand by Your President, about the former First Lady of Georgia, Dutch Sandra Roelofs, was unusual in funding terms in that the idea was so well developed, even at embryonic stage, that Fleury was happy to fast-track it through the process, without demanding a script. “It was obvious to me what their film was going to be and how they were going to make it, so why have them waste their energy or have us waste our money and make the whole process much longer.” The Fund oversees a budget of approximately €2 million per year, with individual documentary production grants of up to €200,000 available. The maximum development spend is €25,000 per project, payable across three stages. In 2013, the Fund launched two major funding schemes. Teledoc Campus, operated with the CoBO Fund, annually offers six emerging producer/director teams the opportunity to produce a 25-minute film. The project is intended to enable these filmmakers to develop their talent and gain experience before tackling bigger productions further down the line. Six production awards of up to €60,000 and 12 development awards of a maximum of €5,000 are offered each year. The Oasis programme, run together with the Prins Bernard Cultuur Fund, enables directors to apply for development

“We try to stimulate their creativity from a very early stage” funding directly to the NFF, without a producer in tow. Each year, ten filmmakers share a development pot of €80,000. The effects are two-fold. They can then approach potential producers with a project that has received a seal of approval from two major cultural funds. “Finally, documentary directors are paid at the conceptual stage, and they don’t have to do it on their own with their own money, in their own time and with no support. We try to stimulate their creativity from a very early stage,” comments Fleury. “I believe that good documentaries are made by directors who feel very self-confident, and if they are stimulated in their self-confidence then I am convinced that then they will find the proper original form to present their film. So I try to help create this ambience where they can find this originality. This is my idea. I don’t care if the film is about the army, or about bicycles, or about fish, or if it will be shot as an interview or hybrid. I just hope that an original form emerges, because that is where the real creation lies.”

by Sylvain Biegeleisen

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18/11/2014 18:15

Orchestrating tenderness

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that, when Honigmann flew for 14 hours to Buenos Aires, she was given little time for recuperation but had to start scouting locations almost immediately. “Very tiring, but glorious!” is her verdict on the experience overall. Honigmann’s approach is a long way removed from that of purist verité filmmakers. As she puts it, “in fact, I don’t see any difference between making fiction and documentary. Of course, you can never, never ever ask in a documentary somebody to do something he or she has never done, but you can help the person

“I don’t see any difference between making fiction and documentary”

Heddy Honigmann talking to film journalist Hans Beerekamp at her Masterclass on Friday. Heddy Honigmann is a ubiquitous presence at IDFA. Her latest feature doc, Around the World in 50 Concerts, opened the festival. By Geoffrey Macnab

On Friday, she gave a masterclass entitled ‘Try A Little Tenderness,’ outlining her approach to filmmaking. Meanwhile, Honigmann has programmed her Top 10 and has also selected three films for The Female Gaze sidebar. Her latest project, 100 Up, is being pitched at The Forum, she is the subject of a retrospective – and last year she was chosen as one of the festival’s ‘Living Legends.’ The Peruvian-Dutch director makes it clear that Around the World in 50 Concerts was a labour of love. The

photo: Nichon Glerum

film was commissioned to mark the 125th anniversary (in 2013) of the Amsterdam-based Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. “This orchestra is very special. It is considered one of the three best in the world,” the director points out. “If you are sitting in the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and I would love for you to do that once, the acoustics are so marvellous that you can hear each instrument.” Not that this was an easy film to make. There was an exhausting travel schedule as the director followed the musicians to cities all over the world. “After the shooting, I was a kind of cadaver!” One of the most onerous tasks was getting permission to film from the right place in the concert halls. The budget was so tight

– make it the best he or she can.” One of her ruses is always to give her subjects something to do – washing, driving a car – at the time they are being filmed. “Then they forget the camera.” Her freewheeling approach is reflected in her IDFA Top 10. It includes fictional films, Victor Erice’s Quince Tree of the Sun and Abbas Kiarostami’s And Life Goes On. Both, she points out, have documentary-like elements. “I remember after seeing And Life Goes On, I said to a colleague, ‘What a beautiful documentary!’ ‘A documentary! It is a fiction film’, they said.” Later, when she saw the film again, she noticed the fictional elements, but still felt that, “if you cut it in two, upstairs it’s a fiction and downstairs it’s a documentary.” Honigmann had seen another of the titles, Fernando Birré’s Tire Dié, many years before but couldn’t recall its title. In the end, she described it to fellow filmmaker José Luis Guerin (whose doc Work in Progress is also in her Top 10). “He said, ‘Don’t tell me you want this film for your Top 10… I have it too.’” As for her new project, about people who are aged 100 or over, this promises to be a typically playful and intimate affair. She describes it as “a film about happiness.” After all, if you didn’t enjoy life, or if you are angry and bitter, you probably wouldn’t stick around for quite so long. “They have a goal,” she adds of her subjects. “They still keep working and doing the things they love.”

at IDFA

War stories

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The reconstruction of the invasion is as much in the detail of the rock music the US troops blared out across the city and the fact that one woman’s contractions synced with the booms of the bombs as the factual accounts of what actually happened. There is no archive footage, just the eye-witness accounts. Benaim says that Noriega, who is now serving a 20-year jail sentence in Panama, agreed to participate because he liked the film’s approach. “He liked the idea that it was multi-voice and that all of the voices were going to be heard. Of course he has his story,

“You have to go inside people’s minds”

Abner Benaim Panamanian director Abner Benaim returns to IDFA with his latest work Invasion, reconstructing the US invasion of Panama in 1989 to depose dictator Manuel Noriega, through the recollections of ordinary citizens as well as the former leader. By Melanie Goodfellow

“As the 25th anniversary of the invasion approached, I started talking to people about what had happened and realised that there was still this urgency to talk, even though so many years had passed,” explains Benaim, who was previously at the festival with

Autlook swoops Austrian doc sales powerhouse Autlook has swooped to take worldwide rights, including North America and UK, for much-hyped The Forecaster by Marcus Vetter (director of The Court, Cinema Jenin) selected for the IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary. The film tells the story of Martin Armstrong, once a USbased, trillion-dollar financial advisor, who developed a computer model to predict economic turning points and even the outbreak of wars, with great precision. When some New York bankers asked him to join ‘the club’ and help to on Russia, he refused to join in their manipulation. A few days later, the FBI stormed his offices, confiscating his computer model and accusing him of a billion-dollar fraud and sending him to prison. A free man again, he predicts that a sovereign debt crisis will start to unfold on a global level after October 1, 2015. Martin Armstrong himself will attend IDFA and give an extended Q&A after Monday’s screening. Here at IDFA, Autlook has also announced a raft of deals on its current slate. David Thorpe’s Do I Sound Gay? (which premiered in Toronto earlier this autumn) has gone to Madman for Australia/New Zealand. The Trials of Muhammad Ali (Kartemquin Film), which had its European premiere at IDFA 2013, has now gone to DR (Denmark), HBO (Latin America), The Festival Channel (India), UR (Sweden), VPRO (the Netherlands) and YLE (Finland). These deals were negotiated by Head of TV Sales Andrea Hock. Meanwhile, all rights deals have been closed on the title with Madman (Australia/NZ), Rare Media (China) and Filmarti (Turkey). Autlook also closed an eye-catching, multi-territory deal with NBC Universal covering key territories like Germany, Switzerland, UK, Japan, France, Italy and the Middle East. This was negotiated by Salma Abdalla for Autlook on behalf of the producers. Here at IDFA, Autlook is handling, among others, Saving Mes Aynak (which Autlook has for the world outside North America) and The New Rijksmuseum – The Film. The company is now looking to move more aggressively into pre-sales. One reason for this, according to Abdalla, is to enable the company “to think about building an audience at an early stage – you are more involved in marketing and art work.” The company recently picked up Bugs (IDFA Central Pitch), Amateurs in Space and School of Democracy. Geoffrey Macnab

photo: Bram Belloni

Maids & Bosses. “There’s no one official version of what happened – everyone has a different opinion on what took place. I didn’t want to take to the streets and try to shoot a historical reconstruction – there’s no trace in any case of what happened, apart from a small memorial. You have to go inside people’s minds… it’s all in the memories of the people.” Benaim and his team initially vetted the stories of 1,000 individuals in the development stage, garnered through an open-call put out via media and social networks. He whittled this group down to 200 interviews, some 50 of which appear in the film.

but that’s not all in the film because that would be another film,” Benaim says. In fact, on the back of the interview for Invasion, Benaim is now in negotiations with Noriega to make another documentary focusing only on the former general’s story. “I’d think it would be interesting to make a film like Errol Morris’ McNamara film,” says Benaim, referring to the US filmmaker’s 2003 picture The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara in which the former US Secretary of Defence talks about modern warfare. “Just let him talk and let people decide whether they believe him or not – rather than an investigation type of film. I already have about three hours of him talking, only audio but it’s interesting research,” adds Benaim, who also produces under the Apertura Films banner. The Panamanian response to the documentary has been phenomenal. Some 50,000 people – a record for a documentary in Panama – saw the film when it was released there this autumn, and the film provoked a media storm and fierce local debate. In another first for a Panamanian film, including fiction works, Invasion has been put forward as Panama’s first-ever best foreignlanguage submission this year. Benaim is now trying to raise backing to create an interactive, digital platform giving access to all the accounts and also enabling other Panamanians to download their invasion stories too.

Bertha Fund ramps up

Mother of the Unborn The IDFA Bertha Fund (IBF) is ramping up. From 2015, the Fund, which supports documentary projects in developing countries and has backed such recent successes as Return to Homs, will offer support to European producers through its brand new scheme, IDFA Bertha Fund – Europe. The aim is to enable these producers to work with filmmakers from developing countries. Geoffrey Macnab reports

“We see it as taking the work we have been doing for 16 years a step further,” Fund Producer Isabel Arrate comments of the new initiative, which has backing from the EU’s MEDIA programme. “Being able to put more money into these productions from developing countries is also a way of giving them a bigger push and more support to present films on another level.” At the same time, Arrate adds, the scheme will give European

producers the opportunity “to broaden their world.” It is conceivable that the IDFA Bertha Fund will be able to support projects at every stage of their lives, from pitching at The Forum to screening at the festival and subsequently distribution. “For us, what is really important is that it is a programme that will also bring together different elements of what IDFA does.” The backing for IBF Europe is available for an initial two-year period. In 2015, the Fund will give coproduction support to six projects. The deadline for submission is February 1, 2015. Then, in 2016, three or four projects will go on to receive distribution support. The application deadline is February 1, 2016. Those looking for distribution support are expected to “think of a plan combining the more traditional distribution for documentary – television and the festival circuit – with outreach, special events or online platforms.” The new scheme is

“geared toward feature-length documentary that really has potential to reach an audience.” As ever, this year’s IDFA programme features several docs supported by the IDFA Bertha Fund. 13 IBF-supported films are scattered across the festival’s various programmes. Several also passed through the IDFA Summer School. Human trafficking doc The Storm Makers (Cambodia/France) is in the IDFA Competition for Mid-Length Documentary. Meanwhile, Tea Time (Chile) by Maite Alberdi, Mother of the Unborn (Egypt/United Arab Emirates) by Nadine Salib and Die Before Blossom (Indonesia) by Ariani Djalal are all in the IDFA Competition for First Appearance. “It is a very author-driven crop,” Arrate suggests. She also points to the increasing number of Fund-supported films from Africa, including François Verster’s The Dream of Sharazad and Nadine Salib’s Mother of the Unborn. “We have in the last four years supported more African projects. Now, we are slowly beginning to see the results of that.”

“It is a very author-driven crop” The Bertha Foundation’s support of the IBF is guaranteed until the end of 2015. The signs are that support will continue beyond that date. The IDFA Bertha Fund also receives support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which supports an IBF human rights programme over the next two years.

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Those Who Said No Iranian director Nima Sarvestani’s brother Rostam was arrested in a raid by revolutionary guards on the family home in Shiraz in 1981 and hanged a year later at the age of 19. The charges were never officially stated, but Sarvestani says his crime “was being a member of a leftist student movement that was fighting for democracy in Iran.” Rostam was among 20,000 Iranians executed in the 1980s by Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime, many of them idealistic teenagers who, disillusioned over the Islamic fundamentalist power grab after the fall of the Shah in 1979, had joined socialist groups. Sarvestani’s Those Who Said No revolves around the Iran Tribunal at The Hague in October 2012 – an independent tribunal aimed at uncovering the truth behind the killings. The documentary stems, says the director, from his parents’ 20-year battle to win justice for their son’s murder. “My father always asked, ‘Is there anywhere else in the world we can go and charge this regime for what they have done?’” says Sarvestani. “‘And if not, how can we tell the world about what happened to our son and thousands of other young people in Iran during the 80s?’” Sarvestani, who also testified at the tribunal, captures the harrowing personal stories of

beatings, sensory deprivation and other forms of torture, as well as eyewitness accounts of the mass executions. “I began working on Those Who Said No in 2001. I’d gathered hundreds of hours of material, but I was never satisfied with it. When the discussions began on actually trying to organise a tribunal, I waited for it to happen,” says Sarvestani. The film also follows victim Iraj Mesdaghi, who spent a decade in jail, in his quest to bring the men who sanctioned the violence to justice. It follows him to a conference in Tokyo where he confronts Iran’s Deputy Interior Minister Gholam Hussein Bolandian, who he accuses of being one of the instigators of the policy. “We worked on getting permission to shoot in Tokyo for a year,” says Sarvestani. “We never told anybody we were going to film Bolandian. He himself does not know yet that we filmed him. It was very exciting for us all.” Melanie Goodfellow IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary

See the screening guide in the middle of this paper for screening times.

Uyghurs, Prisoners of the Absurd In Uyghurs, Prisoners of the Absurd, director Patricio Henriquez details the senseless detention in Guantanamo Bay of 22 Uyghur men from the Chinese-controlled region of Xinjiang.

The film, screening in IDFA’s feature-length competition, focuses on three detainees, Muslims Khalil, Abu Bakker and Ahmat who, after a popular uprising in 1997, escaped from their oppressive homeland to Afghanistan – the one country in the region that didn’t have an extradition treaty with China. After 9/11 when the ‘war on terror’ was in full swing, the US government leafleted parts of Afghanistan offering financial incentives to locals “to crawl through the caves to weed out the bad folks”, to use Donald Rumsfeld’s words. With bounties up to $5,000 per alleged terrorist up for grabs,

the three Uyghurs were fair game to unscrupulous soldiers and pro-US warlords alike and they, along with 19 fellow countrymen, ended up incarcerated in Guantanamo. We, the audience, are continually aware of the detainees’ subsequent liberation as they answer questions in a relaxed manner on camera, but it is the manner of their release that provides the absurdity within the story, steeped as it is in false dawns (as country after country refuses them refuge), political expediency and the increasing threat of Chinese displeasure. “Nobody wanted to create problems with China [which was] placing hard pressure on each country, asking to send them back. And we know if we had sent them back to China, then some of them could be dead today, because it is very fast justice in China,” stresses director Henriquez. The detainees’ release was also the result of the hard work of dedicated lawyers, constitutional rights activists and, in particular, the female US-based Uyghur translator Rusham, whom Henriquez thanks for persuading the men to participate in the film. “We wanted to establish a confidence in them. They didn’t know me,” Henriquez underlines. “We tried to gain the trust of the characters and of course it didn’t work at the beginning, so I began to contact the lawyers who had defended them. They tried, but in the end the key person to get their confidence and to make the contact was Rusham the translator, and she became a central character in the film.” Nick Cunningham IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary

See the screening guide in the middle of this paper for screening times.

Chameleon Chameleon, screening in IDFA’s feature-length competition, is about one of Africa’s most celebrated investigative reporters, Anas Aremeyaw Anas – a journalist whose undercover stunts have earned him a reputation as a James Bond-like figure.

Canadian doc maker Ryan Mullins first learned of Anas when he was sent an article about him with the headline “Smuggler, Forger, Writer, Spy”, detailing his many changes of disguise: addict to Iman, taxi driver to baker. “I had worked in Ghana a few years before and I had always toyed with the notion of going back to make a documentary,” Mullins recalls. As soon as he read the article, he realised he had discovered the perfect subject. “I thought this was incredible fodder for storytelling.” The director quickly sought out Anas. The friend who sent him the article had been at law school with the journalist and was able to arrange an introduction. “I think we spent 20 minutes on the phone before I bought a plane ticket and flew out there.” Anas was open to Mullins’ plan for “a behind the scenes, observational” documentary. The director quickly realised his subject was every bit as flamboyant as the article suggested. “Every-

The Forecaster The economy is heading for the rocks, big time. After 1 October 2015, a sovereign debt crisis will occur, heralding a period of global upheaval to rival the era of the French Revolution. According, that is, to financial forecaster Martin Armstrong. Should we take this prediction seriously? Well, so far Armstrong’s predictions have been startlingly accurate. He predicted both the stock market crash of ’87 and the record recovery of ’89, for example – pretty much to the day. Then, in 1999, the FBI raided his offices, he was arrested on charges of running a Ponzi scheme and jailed for 7 years without trial. “I was making three films about the financial crisis back then”, director Marcus Vetter says of the genesis of The Forecaster, his portrayal of Armstrong that world premieres in IDFA’s feature-length competition. “I wanted to interview Martin Armstrong for one of these in 2000. But then he was imprisoned. Some years later, I began to read his blogs. I tried to interview him in prison in 2008, but I couldn’t get access. When he came out, I went to attend a seminar he was holding, saw all these people attending from all over the world and thought, this is a subject for a film in itself.” The Forecaster is much more than a portrait of Armstrong, however. “Basically, the film is about the debt,” Vetter says. “Nobody understands this – how can it be that normal people can’t continue in debt but governments can? Martin Armstrong had the answer. Governments just don’t care. With the film, I want to provoke a discussion about this – how governments are just indebting themselves and passing it all on to the next generations.” So how reliable are Armstrong’s predictions – for example about the impending crash in 2015? “The fact that he was in prison means everyone has some doubts about him,” the director says. “He was a billionaire and the government accused him of running a Ponzi scheme. People think he must have done something wrong. But I actually read 2,000 pages of court transcripts – everything – and I saw what happened. It’s very clear that he was a victim and not a perpetrator. The government basically accused him of what they are doing.” Mark Baker IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary

See the screening guide in the middle of this paper for screening times (with Extended Q&A on 24 November).

thing that surrounds him is very James Bond-esque.” For example, Mullins was startled to discover that the doors of his office had electronic, fingerprint-triggered keypads. His office itself wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Mickey Spillane private eye novel. “He was everything I thought he would be.” The director acknowledges his qualms at some of Anas’ methods. “I am conflicted about him. On the one hand, his journalistic methods do get results and he is very beloved in his country. On the other hand, there are some questionable ethics to his methods… I think that’s what makes him such a fascinating character… being who he is allowed the film to explore these bigger themes of what it means to be a journalist.” Chameleon was made through EyeSteelFilm and is represented internationally by Dogwoof Global. Mullins credits the late Peter Wintonick as an important sounding board early on in the project. Anas saw a rough cut of the film and felt Mullins was a little soft on him. “His comment was actually that he had hoped there would be more criticism in the film!” Geoffrey Macnab IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary

See the screening guide in the middle of this paper for screening times.

a idf s film

Ida’s Dairy Ida’s Dairy captures the high and lows of clinical depression through the eight-year video diary of Ida Storm, a troubled Norwegian woman in her 20s with a history of self-harm and drug abuse.

Franco’s Promise “Historical truth is not what took place. It is what we think took place.” This troubling insight from writer Jorge Luis Borges is included at the start of Marc Weymuller’s Franco’s Promise.

The film tells the story of an old, ruined village called Belchite, site of a battle in 1937 – and of the soulless modern town that sits beside it. Nobody wants to talk about why the old Belchite crumbled. The director is engaged in his own act of historical excavation. By inviting the old people of Belchite to share their memories, he tries to uncover the story of a town devastated by the Spanish civil war. “Hatred…there was so much hatred,” one old-timer recalls of the divisions between left and right. Even today, almost 80 years later, they are reluctant to discuss the war. They were teenagers or children when the war started in 1936. Some of the stories of the old town are very bloody indeed. With its use of voice-over, still images and stark footage of the rubble, the documentary is strangely reminiscent of Chris Marker’s La Jetée. It is a film shrouded in secrecy and guilt. Weymuller heightens the mystery with his self-consciously enigmatic style. A collective amnesia seems to have settled on the community. It is not easy for the director to see through the fog that has descended. As the old-timers reminisce, a football match plays on television. We see a choir practicing. Such everyday events provide a stark counterpoint to the testament of the interviewees about the bitterness and hatred of the civil war era. When the fascists won, Spanish dictator General Franco had promised that a magnificent new Belchite – “a big and beautiful city” – would be built close to the ruins of the old town, and that hunger would be eradicated. But that’s not what the old-timers remember. Many were living in desperate circumstances, forced to eat cat meat or beetroot leaves. “We were starving, to be honest,” one well-spoken interviewee acknowledges. Kids were baffled by what their parents had endured. A new town soon sprang up close to the rubble of the old one. Geoffrey Macnab IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary

See the screening guide in the middle of this paper for screening times.

Director August B. Hanssen came into contact with Storm in 2010 after she sent him some 50 hours of personal diary tapes dating back to 2006, shot on a primitive HC camera. “She sent an unedited video diary to us because she wanted someone to tell her story,” says Hanssen, who directs and produces through Indie Film, the company he co-founded with producer Carsten Aononsen. “It was kind of intense. I was like whoa! How do we approach this.” Storm’s decision to share her story coincided with her stopping self-harming, but her lower arms, which often come into frame as she talks to the camera, bear the scars of her compulsive cutting. “She used to cut over the old scars,” says Hanssen. “She did have one relapse, although I didn’t realise until later because I was processing earlier tapes and it took me some time to get up to speed with contemporary developments.” Hanssen intercuts Storm’s shakily shot monologues, charting

her mood swings from desperate feelings of futility to moments of elation, with his own footage, deliberately shot to mimic the chaotic, amateur style of the original tapes. “I wanted to keep her style. I wanted it to feel like a video diary. We shot some stuff with a GoPro camera, some with a higher-end camera,” says Hanssen. “I didn’t want to structure it too much, but I wanted it to be readable so you get a sense of what is happening.” The film never reveals much about Storm’s background or what might have been a trigger for her psychiatric problems in adult life. Hanssen says this was deliberate. “It was something I decided really early on. Giving the background can help the viewer relate to the subject, but in this film I wanted to focus on getting the audience to feel and connect with what Ida was going through rather than explaining why she was like that.” Melanie Goodfellow IDFA Competition for Mid-Length Documentary Pitched at the Forum in 2013

See the screening guide in the middle of this paper for screening times.

The Queen of Silence “I was always fascinated by gypsy culture – maybe because they isolate themselves from other people, surround their culture and families with walls – and I like breaking walls,” director Agnieszka Zwiefka says of her debut feature doc The Queen of Silence, screening in IDFA’s feature-length competition. “I wanted to get on the other side of this wall; to make a film from the inside.”

The filmmaker spent almost three years with a Roma community in Wroclaw, Poland, filming their daily lives and struggles with poverty, exclusion and the local population. She found herself naturally zooming in on ten-year-old Denisa, a deaf mute Roma girl. “Soon we found it impossible to film anything without Denisa being present,” she recalls. “She literally popped up in every shot, screaming for the attention she really never got before. I think she has a huge desire and need to communicate – being deaf, not able to speak or even use sign language, she somehow felt the presence of the camera is a way for her to communicate. I just followed her into this crazy imaginary world. And I have to say, making this film I also felt like a kid again. It was a great feeling.” Denisa also communicates through dance – in particular, Bollywood-style dancing she watches on DVDs retrieved from bins. Director Zwiefka takes this element and runs with it, staging large-scale Bollywood dance sequences in the film, featuring not only Denisa and the Roma but also local Poles. “There is this word in the Roma language, ‘dili’, which means crazy. The Roma really thought I was crazy – wanting to spend

time with them was crazy enough, but when I asked if we can have rehearsals with the kids and a famous Polish choreographer, Maciek Florek, they really thought I was insane.” Denisa herself has not yet seen the film, which was finished just days before IDFA, but the director says she plans to meet up with her next month and take a copy of this year’s official IDFA poster with her, which features Denisa. “I know she will be thrilled. Finally she is a on a poster, like the true star she always wanted to be,” Zwiefka says. Mark Baker IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary

See the screening guide in the middle of this paper for screening times.

Waiting for August Teodora Ana Mihai’s Waiting for August, screening in IDFA’s DOC U competition and the Female Gaze sidebar, arrives at the festival laden with gongs following its premiere at Visions du Reel in April 2014. Awards include Best International Feature documentary at Hot Docs and Best Feature Documentary at Karlovy Vary.

The film is a poignant and touching study of Romanian teenager Georgiana, who becomes temporary matriarch to her six siblings when their mother is forced to go to Italy to find work. While she is away, the kids do what kids do; fight, play, cry, but generally they get on with things, look forward to Skype sessions and news of presents coming their way. But all the time, Georgiana is there; cooking dinner, comforting, cajoling, looking after the finances and, over the course of her mother’s nine-month absence, blossoming into womanhood. “I wanted to tell the story of a normal family, beautiful kids who are dealing with this situation in a very brave way,” points out Mihai. “And focus on the human values, the strength and the resilience, and the beautiful dynamic between the siblings. This makes for a different impact. It’s very easy to slap your audience

in the face with something very tragic and get an immediate response, but I really wanted people to reflect on it this way, and come to their own conclusions.” The film was inspired in part by the director’s own life story. Mihai’s parents fled Ceaucescu’s Romania in 1988, leaving her behind as collateral to guarantee their return. “The long wait and the uncertainty weighed on me a lot when I was a kid... I couldn’t help notice history was repeating itself in a different context. Parents are still fleeing Romania, for economic reasons.” She also saw her film as a way to achieve a degree of ‘seamlessness’ she believes is more associated with fiction filmmaking. “I wanted to take conventions away, like a voice-over or a text, to see what this gives... to my great surprise, some people went to the film without knowing it’s a documentary and came out convinced it was a highly improvised fiction film.” Nick Cunningham IDFA DOC U Competition

See the screening guide in the middle of this paper for screening times.

Program TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 1 1

9:00

Sunday 23 November

TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 2 2

TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 3 3

TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 5 5

TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 6 6

DE MUNT DE MUNT 9

10:00

War of Lies War of Lies

Masters, 98’ Masters, 98’

10:30

Alice Fargier Alice Fargier

After the screening, After the screening, journalist journalist Remco Meijer Remco speaks Meijer with speaks the with the 11:00 director. director.

Panorama, 25’Panorama, 25’

89’ , 89’ IDFA DOC U Competition IDFA DOC U,Competition

10:30

Misconception Misconception Jessica YuJessica Yu

The Bridge The Bridge

The Female Gaze The ,Female 93’ Gaze, 93’

Ileana Stanculescu Ileana Stanculescu

Ulrich Seidl Ulrich – Seidl – A Director A Director at Workat Work

10:30

11:15

The Female Gaze The ,Female 75’ Gaze, 75’

DE MUNT DE MUNT 13

In the Shadow In the Shadow of War of War 12:30

12:15

Georgia Scott, Georgia Sophia Scott, Scott Sophia Scott

12:30

Movies that Movies Matter that day: Matter day: 12:45 12:45 Who Those Said Who No Said No Of Men Of andMen Warand War Those Nima Sarvestani Nima Sarvestani Laurent Bécue-Renard Laurent Bécue-Renard Feature-Length Feature-Length Competition,Competition 90’ , 90’ 13:00 Feature-Length Feature-Length Competition,Competition 142’ , 142’

13:00

Cain’s Children Cain’s Children Marcell Gero Marcell Gero

Film screening Film screening followed by followed by Extended Q&A. Extended Moderated Q&A. Moderated by by Movies that Movies Matter. that Matter.

Best of Fests, Best 103’ of Fests, 103’

16:15 16:00 16:00

Rüdiger Suchsland Rüdiger Suchsland Best of Fests, Best 115’ of Fests, 115’

15:30

13:30

Hubert Sauper Hubert Sauper

Anders Riis-Hansen Anders Riis-Hansen

Dutch Competition Dutch,Competition 92’ , 92’

17:00

15:45

17:45

18:00 18:00

A special screening A special screening of of CITIZENFOUR, CITIZENFOUR, including an including an exclusive interview exclusive with interview with 20:00 20:00 director Laura director Poitras Laura by Poitras Dutch by Dutch 20:30 20:30 public TV’spublic U.S. correspondent TV’s U.S. correspondent Pekka Pekka Eelco Bosch Eelco van Bosch Rosenthal. van Rosenthal. AlexanderAlexander Oey Oey

CITIZENFOUR CITIZENFOUR 21:00 Laura Poitras Laura Poitras

20:00

17:30

17:15

17:30

Maria Tarantino Maria Tarantino

PeasantPeasant Letter Letter

17:45

Panorama, 83’Panorama, 83’

Die Before DieBlossom Before BlossomVPRO Extra: VPRO Extra: Ariani Djalal Ariani Djalal Night Will Night FallWill Fall

Panorama, 85’Panorama, 85’

Feature-Length Feature-Length Competition,Competition 78’ , 78’

Zofia Pregowska Zofia Pregowska