IDFA Special 2014/3 (English) by IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

special industry

INCLUDING SCHEDULE

MON 24 & TUE 25 NOV

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

Ileana Stanculescu, Kim Longinotto and Chris Hegedus at the Female Gaze debate on Saturday photo: Bram Belloni

Shattering the glass ceiling The heated Female Gaze debate on Saturday investigated the under-representation of women in the documentary world. By Melanie Goodfellow “The essential question is whether women are under-represented. Does a glass ceiling exist in the documentary industry and how are women represented in documentaries,” said IDFA director Ally Derks in her opening remarks. The debate was part of a larger focus on women in documentary by IDFA this year, which also features a sidebar of 28 films by women, selected by 15 of the world’s top female documentarians, including Kim Longinotto, Barbara Kopple and Rakhshan Bani-Etamad, all of whom attended Saturday’s event. As part of the focus, IDFA also conducted its own study into how women fared at the festival, the results of which were unveiled at the debate. It revealed that while the festival does not do badly in comparison to festivals like Cannes, Sundance and Berlin, there was still considerable room for improvement. According to the statistics running from 2003 to 2013, a total of 40,581 directors submitted films to the festival in that period, 15,006, or 37.1%, of whom were women. In total 4,068 films were submitted for the period with 1,398, or 33.2%, by women. On the awards front, 33 female-directed films

had picked up top prizes at the festival over the past decade, against 76 awards for male directed pictures. Only one woman has ever won the top prize: Danish Pernille Rose Gronkjaer’s The Monastery – Mr Vig & the Nun. The stats showed that juries consisting predominantly of men – 35 out of the 53 juries over the last ten years – were less likely to award female directors. Possible solutions, suggested and thrashed out over the course of the two-hour debate, included quotas, equal gender juries and a new Bechdel-style test, suggested by Debra Zimmerman, executive director of Women Make Movies. “It could include criteria like 50% of subjects and 50% of experts being women,” she said.

Guests Meet Guests 24/11/2014, 18:00 hours De Jaren Café Hosted by ARTE 25/11/2014, 18:00 hours De Jaren Café Hosted by Cinemachile and Chiledoc

Going underground Fresh from prying on the furtive activities of Austrians in their cellars (the subject of his new doc Im Keller / In the Basement), Ulrich Seidl is turning his eyes toward Napoleonic times. By Geoffrey Macnab

Speaking during IDFA, Seidl revealed he is hatching a new feature, a historical drama set in the late 18th century in “the milieu of the poorest of the poor.” These are young people, returning from war and having to engage in criminal activities to survive. Its main character is Herr Grasl, a real-life Robin Hood-like figure who fought back against the authorities. Ask the director about his new cellar doc (screening in Framing Reality) and why he is so fascinated by Austrians’ basements and he replies: “long ago, I realised that the average Austrian likes to spend their leisure time in their cellar engaging in their passions, hobbies and obsessions.” Cellars, Seidl elaborates, aren’t just the places where Austrians relax. They are also “places of fear, darkness and criminality.” Yes, Seidl has a cellar in his own house but, no, he doesn’t use it for sado-masochistic activities or for drinking toasts to Adolf Hitler or for target practice. Instead, he keeps his wine down there. “I was first confronted with cellars as a child because my grandmother had one in which she stored food,” the Austrian reminisces. “In Vienna, there are these multi-family tenement blocks which have coal cellars below them. Where I live near Vienna, I have a large wine cellar in the rock.” Parts of Im Keller seem very comic. However, the director insists he did not set out to mock his subjects. Whether or not they have cellars, everyone – Seidl believes – has “two sides to them… they will see the film and perhaps think about that and find that part of themselves in it.” Seidl’s fictional films (for example, his recent

Paradise trilogy) have a documentary-like feel. Meanwhile, his docs seem as carefully constructed as fictional films. “In the Basement film, it was clear that it was going to be a documentary,” Seidl says. “In the case of a documentary, you have people who are playing themselves, who are authentic. They are not taking on a fictional role. It is their life and their convictions. Obviously, that is different in the context of a fiction film.”

“Fear, darkness and criminality” Seidl has a cordial relationship with the subjects of Im Keller. Many came to Venice for the film’s world premiere and enjoyed the doc. “They all approved of it because what was being shown was their lives and they stand by their lives.” The Nazi enthusiasts stayed away. Seidl couldn’t guarantee their safety. (“That would have been too dangerous, because you can’t know what people are going to do at a premiere. What would have happened if somebody in the audience had got up and decided they wanted to attack Herr Ochs, the owner of the cellar. I wouldn’t want to expose him to something like that.”) So is he a demonstrative director? “I am very quiet. Occasionally I do scream. But not as much as Haneke!” read more at www.idfa.nl/industry/daily.aspx

DOCS FROM FLANDERS @ IDFA 2014 WAITING WAITING FOR FOR AUGUST AUGUST

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GLADIATORS, GLADIATORS, A DIFFERENT WORLD A DIFFERENT WORLD FORUM PROJECT FORUM PROJECT BY ARUNAS MATELIS BY ARUNAS MATELIS CO-PRODUCTION (FLANDERS) CO-PRODUCTION (FLANDERS) ASSOCIATE DIRECTORS ASSOCIATE DIRECTORS 25 NOV, 15:10, ZUILENZAAL 25 NOV, 15:10, ZUILENZAAL

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Kids, cinema get new slots at Forum Netherlands filmmaker Heddy Honigmann, Chilean Maite Alberdi, Iranian Maryam Ebrahami, Danish Janus Metz and the UK’s Patrick Collerton will be among the directors pitching their upcoming projects at the IDFA Forum which kicks off Monday. By Melanie Goodfellow

“As in previous editions, we’ve got a great selection from all over the world,” says IDFA industry chief Adriek van Nieuwenhuyzen on the eve of the three-day co-financing event. “We had a lot of good projects from the UK this year – which is a reflection of its funding system, but also of the fact there’s a lot of great talent. Israel’s also back. France and Germany were strong as usual,” she continues. “Asia isn’t as present as last year, although we’ve got two great projects from China: Weaving, which was an IDFA Bertha Fund grantee, and China’s Van Gogh, which is a co-production with the Netherlands. There’s also a Latin American presence with two projects from Chile.”

Former Forum pitches Chilean project The Grown-Ups – revolving around a group of Santiago friends with Down’s syndrome who have attended the same school for the last 40 years – is the latest project from Maite Alberdi, whose debut film Tea Time was pitched at the Forum in 2011, and is showing in the First Appearance Competition. It is just one of 18 former Forum pitches playing in IDFA’s official festival selection this year alongside Camilla Nielsson’s Democrats, Hanna Polak’s Something Better to Come, Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of War and Men and James Spione’s Silenced. Other Forum returnees include Denmark’s Metz, who famously pitched his award-winning Afghan frontline tale Armadillo at the Forum in 2009. He is back with Between Two Worlds exploring the topic of “mail-order brides” through the

tale of a Thai woman running such a service from the small Danish village where she lives with her husband.

Docs4Cinema Pitches For the first time, projects in the fledgling Docs4Cinema category, aimed at films with theatrical potential, will also be pitched at a Round Table Pitches session on Monday, 24 November. The line-up includes Norwegian Benjamin Ree’s Magnus, a portrait of chess grandmaster and latterly fashion model Magnus Carlsen; Notes on Blindness by British duo Peter Middleton and James Spinney, revolving around a recently blind academic’s audio diary of what it means to lose one’s sight; and Collerton’s The Nine Lives of James Brett, about a former drugs dealer who is trying to convince Afghani farmers to grow pomegranates rather than poppy seeds for opium. “It’s a category we introduced last year but we just laid on one-to-one meetings last year. We’re seeing a lot of distributors as well as broadcasters signing up for the session, which is encouraging,” says Van Nieuwenhuyzen. Theatrical-focused distributors and sales agents attending the event this year, she notes, include California-based ro*co films, Germany’s Mind Jazz, Danish LevelK, French Jour2Fete and Doc & Film International. As in previous years, there will be other specialist Round Table Pitches Sessions devoted to arts and culture as well as cross-media.

Russia government blacklists filmmaker Mansky

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Russia’s Ministry of Culture has blacklisted filmmaker Vitaly Mansky over his views opposing Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. By Melanie Goodfellow

Side events and new intiatives Alongside the pitching and one-to-one meetings, the Forum programme also includes two co-production focused events, the Co-producers Summit and RealYoung, aimed at bringing makers of documentaries for younger generations together. There will also be a presentation of WHY SLAVERY?, a follow up project to WHY POVERTY? which was watched by millions around the globe.

Turn up the Volya

It’s All Academic

IDFA 2014 is busy for Rotterdam-based Volya Films, run by Denis Vaslin and former IDFA Forum chief Fleur Knopperts. The team is co-producer on François Verster’s Masters selection The Dream of Shahrazad, pitched at the Forum 2012, and is majority producer on the acclaimed Naziha’s Spring (Gülsah Dogan), Fleur Knopperts screening in the Dutch Competition. “The film is about female emancipation in the local Moroccan community,” Knopperts explains. The company currently has three docs in advanced production. Debut director Marleine van der Werf ’s The Market, about the stresses suffered by market traders when a new covered market is constructed in Rotterdam, is a co-pro with RTV Rhineman and broadcaster NCRV. Ingeborg Jansen’s Schuldenaars (Debtors, broadcast March 2015), made with Buddhist broadcaster BOS, is a study of the effect of bankruptcy on small businesses. Waiting for Giraffes by Marco di Stefanis is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, CoBO, EO broadcaster (evangelical), the Media Fund, Creative Europe and VAF, and co-produced with Belgian Timescape. The film, currently shooting ahead of late 2015 delivery is about a zoo in the Occupied Territories that wants to re-introduce giraffes. “Like the Palestinians themselves, the zoo wants to be recognised internationally,” Knopperts says. “The docs we do work on three levels,” comments Vaslin. “Local, national and international; we try to have at least two of these aspects in place and if possible three, such as A Perfect Game (about Rotterdam baseball players trying to make it in the US, currently at finance stage), which is perfect. We like society and political subjects, but ones which tell human stories. And told visually. It can be a chaotic visual style, as long it corresponds to the film. And we are not repetitive.” Nick Cunningham

Artur Liebhart of Poland-based Planete+ Doc Film Festival has confirmed two IDFA 2014 titles and is negotiating two more for his Planete Doc Academy programme. Launched in 2011, the programme uses high profile, contemporary docs for film education aimed at middle school, high school and university students. The confirmed titles are Marcus Vetter’s The Forecaster, selected for main competition and Pixadores in First Appearance. In addition Liebhart’s distribution outfit Against Gravity is one of a number of European distributors selecting films under the new EDN umbrella initiative Moving Docs whose aim is to create innovative outreach strategies and provide opportunities for urban and rural European audiences to enjoy regular screenings of documentary films through a wide variety of media and platforms. In 2014, for the third time Planete+ Doc Film Festival took place simultaneously in Warsaw and Wroclaw with in-depth filmmaker masterclasses, discussion panels, Q&A sessions and, most importantly according to Liebhart, a “wealth of inspiring documentary films from across the globe.” “I don’t think that, with the blessings of modern technology and media, the festival must be tied to one location. There are plenty of possibilities when it comes to reaching wide audiences and promoting awareness. You are free to expand your event in ways that were hard to imagine a decade ago. It is very exciting both for us and for our supporters. This nomadic form of festival growth is something I strongly believe in,” Liebhart comments. Nick Cunningham

Pixadores

Vitaly Mansky

photo: Bram Belloni

According to a report on Russia’s non-governmental news agency Interfax, Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky said last Wednesday that none of Mansky’s projects – from his films to the cutting-edge Artdocfest the director helped create, will get state funding from now on. “Not a single one of Mansky’s projects, including Artdocfest, will ever get any money, as long as I am Minister of Culture,” Interfax quoted Medinsky as saying openly to journalists. Mansky, who is at IDFA to present his latest project Close Relations – The Ukraine Crisis, My Family and I at the Forum – says the openness of Medinsky’s threat is a worrying development. “His declaration is a sign of support and loyalty for those in power and their ideology,” Mansky says. “But there is another important detail; this is the first time, to my knowledge in post-Soviet times, that a state authority has said that a person can be deprived of his or her professional activities because of their political views.” “In Soviet times, this was commonplace – take, for example, the treatment of Solzhenitsyn, but, this is the first time I’ve encountered this in post-Soviet Russia. It sets a worrying precedent,” he continues. The filmmaker, whose last film Pipeline played in the Green Screen section of IDFA last year, says the funding boycott is not about his films, but about his political views. “I haven’t called for a revolution, I’ve simply said I think it’s wrong to occupy the territory of another country and put troops in,” says Mansky. Mansky said last week’s blacklisting comment follows funding for Close Relations – The Ukraine Crisis, My Family and I suddenly being withdrawn over the summer, even though he knew that the project had been approved by the Ministry of Culture’s expert committee. Mansky will pitch the project, which already has the support of Estonian, Latvian, Finnish, Lithuanian and Polish broadcasters, at the Docs4Cinema Round Table on Monday.

by Sylvain Biegeleisen

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New screens for docs Speaking at IDFA, DocHouse Director Elizabeth Wood reveals further details of the plans for the new ‘Bertha DocHouse Screen’ at the renovated Curzon Bloomsbury in the Brunswick Centre, London, now due to re-open on February 5, 2015. By Geoffrey Macnab

Wood will be programming a 60-seat cinema screen that will be dedicated to showing documentary all the year round. “We like to think of it really as a documentary centre,” Wood says of the new Curzon screen. “We want it to be very much inclusive of other organisations.” The new Bertha DocHouse screen may be located in the Curzon Bloomsbury complex but, Wood states, it will be “entirely independent” in its programming. A “fluid and creative” partnership is envisaged with Curzon. Films that start their lives at the DocHouse screen could conceivably end up showing across the Curzon network of cinemas. The films that Wood and her team programme will also be offered to the Curzon Home Cinema platform. “From the DocHouse point of view, the more documentary screenings the better,” Wood comments. On a larger, 150-seat Curzon screen, Wood will be continuing the ‘DocHouse Thursdays’ screenings showcasing the best in international documentary. Some docs may have their premieres on the bigger screen and then run for the rest of the week in the 60-seat cinema. Others may show only in the smaller cinema, but Wood is promising any film programmed a decent run. The new doc screen is also committed to programming what Wood calls “pure observational films around the world that would never get a run in a cinema, but are very visual and very beautiful.” Titles being lined up for this strand include Summer Pasture, about nomadic herders in Tibet, Walking Under Water, which follows compressor divers from the Badjao tribe in

Mabul Island, and Stream of Love. Wood also expects to re-show Village at the End of the World and festival favourite Happiness. Every Sunday afternoon, the cinema will show docs on the subject of ‘art as revolution.’ The doc screen won’t just be reserved for films that have secured distribution. “We’re very interested in showing films that don’t have distribution.” During a special matinee slot, Wood plans to programme various classic docs. DocHouse is in talks with various universities and colleges about making these screenings part of their courses. Together with Open City, the Bertha DocHouse Screen will also be organising ‘10 of the best from the DocHouse Archive.’ DocHouse was founded by Wood in 2002. In that period, docs were disappearing from British TV screens and were becoming harder and harder for British audiences to see. A decade on, docs are being released in British cinemas in record numbers. “I am really someone on a soapbox,” Wood declares of her mission at DocHouse. “I want to continue the form. I want to ensure that documentary survives in all its quality. I believe it is the way we learn about the world.” The launch of the new Bertha DocHouse screen at the Curzon Bloomsbury comes as exhibitor/ distributor Picturehouse is also planning a dedicated screen for docs at its new site in London’s West End. “We will probably be in competition for some films. There is nothing to be done about that. I think it is great that documentary is getting this kind of attention,” Wood says. “Documentary is established in the cinema. That is a very good thing!”

Doing the Polly maths Emmy-nominated producer Polly Fryer is at Docs for Sale 2014 to drum up festival and sales interest in Chris Dudman’s The Day that Changed My Life about the devastating earthquake that struck New Zealand in February 2011. Commissioned by TVNZ and finished a week before IDFA, 44 and 58-minute versions of the film are available. “In New Zealand, I don’t think we have spent enough time exploring the psychological and human spirit aspects of the event, both on individuals and on ourselves as a nation,” Fryer comments. “So by showing six accounts of that day with never-before-seen archive

Polly Fryer

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and beautifully shot vignettes and dramatic reconstructions, we are hoping to bring out that human spirit and courage and give people a way to think about the effects of the earthquake.” She points out that a total of 110 interviews were conducted so there is potential for a feature-length version of the film. Fryer stressed how she believes the docudrama format powerfully enhances the story. “There is no voice over. It is the stories wholly told by the interviewees, and the reconstructions bring more emotional depth, and provide more visceral information for the audience.” Nick Cunningham

photo: Ruud Jonkers

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Top dog

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Dogwoof, the UK’s leading documentary distribution company, is celebrating its 10th birthday this year. The occasion will be marked on Tuesday night with a special IDFA party (jointly hosted with Sheffield Doc Fest). By Geoffrey Macnab

The company was started by former Nomura banker Andy Whittaker and freelance script doctor Anna Godas in 2004. They took the name Dogwoof in ironic reference to the film The Cat’s Meow. They had less than £50,000 with which to launch the new business. At first, Dogwoof didn’t specialise in docs. The company’s mission was to pioneer digital distribution in the UK. One early pick-up, Danish political thriller The King’s Game, was the first film released on the Film Council’s new Digital Screen Network. Another, psychological thriller EMR, became the first film in the world to have a truly multi-platform release. The UK independent distribution marketplace was already crowded and fiercely competitive. “In the first years, we were learning the business,” Godas recalls. In 2006, Head of Distribution Oli Harbottle joined the company. The following year, Dogwoof came across campaigning, Fair Trade-themed coffee doc Black Gold, directed by Mark and Nick Francis. The success of Black Gold prompted a re-think of company strategy. “It was the first time we did a model with a lot of in-kind partnerships attached and very strong filmmaker support. We released the film and it did very well,” Godas states. In an early example of “event” releasing, Dogwoof gave a ‘green’, carbon-neutral premiere to Franny Armstrong’s Age of Stupid in Leicester Square. Soon, the company decided to release nothing but docs. “At some point, I realised this is a niche that is growing, it makes sense, we do it well, we enjoy it and it is very rewarding,” Godas recalls.

Anna Godas & Andy Whittaker

Through ground-breaking deals with supermarkets the Co-Operative and Waitrose, who supported the marketing of Dogwoof ’s socially conscious films, Dogwoof was able to give its docs expansive releases. The strategy was always to pursue a theatrical release – something which distinguished the company from most other UK doc buyers. “We always believed that a good film should be in the theatre,” Whittaker recalls. “That was probably one of the best decisions we made. We could attract some really high-calibre documentary films because we were offering theatrical release. Other people may have offered more money, but were just going to shunt it to TV.” It helped, too, that Dogwoof was set up in a period when UK broadcasters were turning their backs on documentary – and docs were emerging as a force in UK cinemas. 10 years on, after such releases as The End of the Line, Blackfish, Burma VJ, Leviathan, Cutie and the Boxer, Vanishing of the Bees, The Interrupters and many others, Dogwoof is now the pre-eminent doc distributor in the UK. When Dogwoof released The Act of Killing, it ended up running for 52 weeks at the ICA. The goal now is to maintain its position “at the top table.”

Stubborn Peter Despite appearances to the contrary, Pieter van Huystee is a stubborn man – although there are few doc producers as nice to talk to, or as avuncular, or indeed as successful given the 100-plus productions he has under his belt. If being stubborn is what has makes him so prolific, then he must be very stubborn indeed. Van Huystee is at IDFA 2014 with three films, and talks passionately about each. He also lays out his raison d’etre as a producer. “It is always about the person. Can I work with him? Can they inspire me? Can I inspire them? But I always say to them, ‘it is your film, but my production.’” Ramon Gieling’s Home, in Dutch Competition, came about after a plea from the heart. The film is about homelessness, dislocation and being a refugee in Europe, centering on the highly charismatic Ivorian Cyriaque. “Ramon came to me and said ‘Peter, I can’t make a film – they won’t fund me’, so I said, ‘The only thing we can do is to go ahead and make the film – that job we know.’” Daan Willekens’ Wolflady, screening in IDFA’s Music section, chronicles the rise of ‘the new Amy Winehouse’, Sharon

Pieter van Huystee

Kovacs, and her intense relationship with music producer Oscar Holleman. “They dive into each other,” comments Van Huystee. But Van Huystee reserves a special comment for Our City, directed by Maria Tarantino and screening in Panorama. “It is a project I support with all my heart,” he smiles. “Three years ago, a girl came to me with a beautiful name and said, ‘You made Amsterdam Global Village with Johan van der Keuken’ (which I consider to be the work I want to be most remembered for), and she said ‘I want to learn from you how you achieved that level of filmmaking.’ Then she showed me a 10-minute thing and she really caught my eye – it was intuitive.” “And she proves a point. You can go to whoever you want to for financing but there must be something stubborn in you, otherwise you can’t take care of yourself. Stubborn artists, which sometimes makes them awful, but it is also why they are great. They show us what we can’t do ourselves. And that is how she is – stubborn. But she also has a poetry in her which I think is wonderful.” Nick Cunningham

photo: Corinne de Korver

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Canadian director Brett Gaylor gave a sneak preview of his upcoming Do Not Track, exploring how our data is being mined every time we log on, and not just by the NSA, as part of DocLab event Who is Your Data? on Saturday. “Do Not Track is a documentary series about tracking that tracks you,” said Gaylor. “When you read the morning paper, dozens of companies are observing you. The big question is what’s the harm. My agenda is to incite curiosity.” The interactive series, due for release in March 2015, will incorporate tools like disconnect.me, showing users who is watching them when they log on to a certain site, to enable users to discover just how their data is being tracked. The project, which was pitched at the Forum last year in the cross-media section, is produced by Paris-based Upian with the backing of the interactive departments of Canada’s NFB and Franco-German broadcaster Arte. It is one five projects involving the NFB’s interactive department being presented at IDFA DocLab this year. As well as Do Not Track, the Montreal branch, headed by Hugues Sweeney, was also involved in competition titles Primal, examining how we express feelings, and In Limbo, looking at how our lives are captured by the data we create. “On the Montreal side, we’ve always got four projects in the concept stage, four in development stage and four in production stage,” Sweeney says. The English-language Vancouver digital hub, headed by Loc Dao, is also at DocLab with Seven Digital Deadly Sins, its joint work with UK newspaper The Guardian exploring internet sins linked to the original seven deadly sins. Dao will fly out to London this week to pin down the details of a second project with newspaper. The platform will be at the heart of the DocLab Live event Love & Other Deadly Sins on Monday, presented by Canadian comedian Ophira Eisenberg. “We’ll focus on three of the original sins. So we’ll focus on sloth, wrath and lust,” says Dao. He, Sweeney and Vancouver-based producer Janine Steele will also be at the Forum over the coming days scouting for projects. Melanie Goodfellow

Cat’s eyes open Among the extensive Cat & Docs slate at IDFA 2014 are three films in First Appearance: the Indonesian Die Before Blossom; Placebo from India and Tea Time from Chile. “In Die Before Blossom, director Ariani Djalal has made a film about the school system that is really killing kids and their nature, the way that Islamic values are being taught to the kids, Catherine le Clef how they must arrive at school at 6am to start to pray instead of to study,” company Catherine le Clef explains. Abhay Kumar’s Placebo is also about education, focusing on students at medical school, “how it works in terms of competition and pressure, and the suicides – that’s why we wanted to represent that film.” Tea Time by Maite Alberdi is an altogether lighter film, focusing on a group of old female friends who take tea once a month, and talk about sex and love and Chile. “I think it is really important that these new directors have a sales agent,” Le Clef comments. “It is so hard for them to sell a film and to approach people and I think without a company like us they may have a flyer on the wall but nobody will talk to them. We know the buyers, we persuade them to see the film and we discuss it, and I think it would be so hard for the filmmakers to have to do that work. When we choose a film the buyers know exactly the type of film we like. They will watch it. They may reject it, but they will watch it.” Le Clef is also selling, among other docs, the main competition title Of Men and War, and The Storm Makers in the mid-length competition, both of which Le Clef refers to as “real eye-openers.” Nick Cunningham

THE NORWEGIAN FILM INSTITUTE CONGRATULATES THE FILMS SELECTED FOR IDFA 2014 Ida’s Diary

MEDIUM LENGTH COMPETITION

Ballet Boys

KIDS & DOCS / DOC U COMPETITION

Drone

BEST OF FEST

Gulabi Gang THE FEMALE GAZE

Killer Slope

a idf s film

In April 2014, a group of Dutch climbers began an expedition to climb Cho Oyu, one of the highest mountains in the world. The team included renowned investigative journalist and documentary maker Geertjan Lassche, whose film about the expedition, Killer Slope, has turned into one of the phenomena of this year’s IDFA.

Ghosts from the Past Cinta Forger and Walther Grotenhuis’ Ghosts from the Past is an odyssey into the past of Dutch former criminal Viggo, who goes in search of the innocent, sensitive boy he once was and the causes of him becoming a “hard, nasty bastard.” These causes lie principally in Viggo’s family background which, as we gradually discover, is extremely unconventional and troubled. “When I started making the film, I knew nothing about Viggo’s past,” director Grotenhuis says. “It was a completely blank page. I just started interviewing him and it spread from there.” The story unfolds through these interviews with Viggo and also with two of his sisters, along with footage of the three of them trying to come to terms with their shared demons, and a huge family archive of photographs, home movies and diaries. “The family told me they knew there was this huge archive,” Grotenhuis says. “But they didn’t know where it was. They hadn’t seen it for decades. It turned out one sister had a lot of it, and the other sister had a lot more. I told them not to open it – it turned out to be this absolute treasure trove of material they hadn’t seen for a long, long time.”

We accompany Viggo and his sisters in their exploration of this family archive, as they gradually uncover and then relive dark secrets behind the images of seemingly happy children at play, holidays and family life. As the children get older, hints start to emerge that all may not be as it seems – Viggo transforms before our eyes from a carefree young boy playing with toys to an angry young man posing with an Uzi. Towards the end of the film, at the conclusion of this 90-minute tour of his life we have been on, Viggo says to his psychotherapist, “I tried, but I haven’t got very far.” That innocent, sensitive boy he once was is still an elusive image in a black-and-white home movie. Viggo’s relationship with his sisters also remains problematic. “I don’t think the film has actually helped their relationships with one another that much,” Grotenhuis says. “They still fight. They still live on their separate islands. But they will all be at the premiere. Which is fantastic.” Mark Baker IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

See the schedule in this paper for screening times.

Of Men and War French director Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War revolves around a group of US veterans undergoing therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, following tours of duty in the 2003 Iraq War.

The director spent a decade researching and making the film, gaining unparalleled access to the therapy sessions at the Pathway Home in California as well as the home lives of the men taking part, his camera and crew eventually becoming an integral part of the healing process. “There is cinema because there is therapy in the film and there is therapy because there is cinema,” says Bécue-Renard. “None

of the patients verbalise that, but it’s there.” One sign of this, he says, is that the veterans would snap back into therapy mode the minute camera started to roll months later for shots of them with their families. “Interestingly in those scenes, the presence of the camera creates a triangle with everyone – the wives, children and vets – using it to say something to one another,” the director says. Of Men and War is part of a larger, long-term trilogy – Genealogy of Wrath – looking at the impact of war on both the fighters and future generations touched by the veterans’ subsequent, war-scarred behaviour. The trilogy is inspired by Bécue-Renard’s personal fascination with his late grandfathers’ experiences in World War I and the impact altered personas have on those around them. “The trauma of war is passed on from generation to generation. We all carry it in our lives,” he says. The first film in the trilogy, War-Wearied, focused on Bosnian war widows who lost their husbands on the Yugoslav War. Bécue-Renard spent time in Sarajevo from 1995 to 1996, editing the magazine Sarajevo Online. “After focusing on the mythical figure of the war widow, I wanted to address the issue of the warrior,” he says, adding that the third film in the trilogy will focus on the impact of war on children. The director will be taking part in an extended Q&A after the screening on Monday, 24 November. Melanie Goodfellow

Lassche spent months preparing for the climb. He was determined not to be one of those filmmakers who stuck around at base camp while the rest of the team headed toward the peak. His film sets out to explore the mind-set of the mountaineers. It was his intention to be there himself, 7,000 metres above sea level, and thereby to try to understand the attraction of such an expedition. The other mountaineers accepted him as an equal. Mountaineering is an activity riven with contradictions. On the one hand, the awe-inspiring feeling of being (literally) on top of the world, and on the other, the squalor and hardship involved in reaching the peak. “A horror movie pales in comparison,” one climber is shown commenting on TV before the expedition begins. “The truth is not so romantic as you think,” Lassche responds to the question of what drives the mountaineers. In the end, the trip didn’t go as hoped. There was controversy about the unethical behaviour of expedition leader, Wilco. The director was fascinated by the response to the doc – and to the climber’s behaviour – from Danilo Tic (one of the bestknown mountaineers in the world and Lassche’s alpine trainer). “He said an expedition leader at that height can never be your guide to the top. If you decide to go there and be above 6,000 metres, in a way you give up your life, you give up your rights – don’t blame anybody if things go wrong.” “As a human being and as a journalist at sea level, I don’t agree,” the director says. “As a filmmaker who slowly became a mountaineer, I know he is right… When you are there, at that height, you don’t think about the others. You only think about yourself.” Geoffrey Macnab IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

See the schedule in this paper for screening times.

Messi He’s the little wizard with the immaculate left foot, the Argentine footballer often described as the best player in the world; yet Lionel Messi remains an inscrutable figure. Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia, the filmmaker behind such darkly outrageous movies as Perdita Durango and Day of the Beast, wasn’t a big football fan, but was intrigued when MediaPro proposed he made a doc about Messi. “It was a technical challenge,” the director says of the central conceit of the film – namely to have friends, teammates and journalists having dinner, discussing the little genius. Shooting in restaurants in Spain and Argentina, De la Iglesia was able to wrangle a spectacular cast of Messi admirers, among them Dutch legend Johan Cruijff, former Argentine manager and world cup winner Cesar Luis Menotti, and Messi’s Barcelona colleagues Javier Mascherano and Gerard Piqué. “We built a set in Buenos Aires and another one exactly the same in Barcelona.” The doc gives the illusion that all the diners are in the same place at the same time. “I was trying to make this beautiful idea. Remember in Broadway Danny Rose, the Woody Allen movie, when people are remembering someone in a diner,” De la Iglesia explains. “The second point is that people are more relaxed when they are eating. The camera was really far from the table. There were maybe 100 extras...” To his regret, De La Iglesia wasn’t able to interview Diego Maradona (who had demanded a huge fee to appear and therefore only features in archive material). As one interviewee makes clear, Messi has moved the conversation on. “Thank goodness for Messi, otherwise we’d still be talking about Maradona!” For De la Iglesia, the ‘rosebud’ moment is when he discovers Messi’s utter devotion to his grandmother (who died in the late ’90s). She was his mentor when he was a little boy, beginning to play football, and she is the one to whom he beckons whenever he points his finger to the skies after scoring yet another goal. Geoffrey Macnab

IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary Pitched at the IDFA Forum in 2013

See the schedule in this paper for screening times.

Masters

See the schedule in this paper for screening times.

Our catalogue is available to screen online at www.nposales.com

NPO Sales Bart de Graaffweg 2 1217 ZL Hilversum The Netherlands T. +31356773561 info@nposales.com

Siblings > VPRO Television Foto: Pim Hawinkels

a idf s film

Democrats

Something Better to Come

Danish filmmaker Camilla Nielsson reveals she was somewhat underwhelmed by the premise of her latest film Democrats, an up-close account of the process surrounding Zimbabwe’s drafting of a new constitution in 2013, when she was first approached by Copenhagen-based Upfront Films to shoot the documentary.

“The film was not my idea. It came from a Danish journalist living in Zimbabwe, Peter Tygesen, who pitched it to the production company where I made my last film Mumbai Disconnected and that’s how the idea came about. I thought it sounded like a boring idea for a movie,” she recalls. “I thought, this is going to be about clauses and law-making and how explicit will the drama be for people who don’t know law,” recalls Nielsson. It was not until she met the two rival Zimbabwe politicians charged with laying the groundwork for the new constitution – Paul Mangwana of ruling Robert Mugabe’s ZANUPF and Douglas Mwonzora of the Movement for Democratic Change opposition party – that Nielsson decided to come on board. “In these types of films, it’s all about the chemistry and trust and connection. Mangwana

Elephant’s Dream In Elephant’s Dream, Belgian director Kristof Bilsen takes a wry look at the ‘revolution of modernisation’ overtaking the Congo as seen through the eyes of four engaging protagonists. Post Office employee Henriette looks forward to the imminent privatisation of her employer, courtesy of Chinese Telecom. Shy railway official Simon and his grumpy underling Nzai bicker like characters from Beckett, while the lieutenant in charge of the fire station sits in the building’s roofless husk, itself gutted by fire a few years previously. “There are so many films talking about the

and I connected from the very start. We had some common ground on colonial history and the situation in Africa,” says the filmmaker. “He perhaps met with a different point of view than that of BBC journalists or other white media. I think he felt I could tell a different story about his country.” Having been granted permission to shoot by Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Constitutional Affairs, Nielsson and her crew track Mangwana and Mwonzora as they tour the country garnering public opinion on what they want to see in the new constitution. These meetings sometimes turned bloody as the opposing factions clashed and Nielsson says she and her cinematographer

sometimes feared for their safety. “It’s a very laborious process to film in Zimbabwe. In the beginning we had to break down a lot of walls. Foreign media has been banned in Zimbabwe for many years so even the idea of having a white film crew tailing two politicians, filming everything observationally, getting in and out of cars, in and out of buildings was kind of a circus,” she adds. Melanie Goodfellow

rapes in the Congolese Eastern Provinces, and the horror and the heart of darkness, or you have the other line about how the Congolese poor make music and how they are creative, but there is this much more ambiguous and difficult thing to tackle, which is the colonial legacy and why things are currently in the state they are, and why things do not move in the way we would wish them to.” As if to underline the Beckettian theme, everybody in the film is waiting. Waiting to be paid a salary, writing for the train to arrive, waiting for a fire to be put out. When these things eventually happen, the excitement is palpable, but not before the characters have clearly voiced their dissatisfaction. “We are infected by the law of apathy,” a union leader intones, “which now results in our society being notorious for being needy and poor.”

Bilsen, who shot his film over three years, seems more qualified than most to examine the legacy of his country’s notorious colonial past. “There is a confusion in our collective memory, I guess, about that whole thing that we suppressed and put under the carpet… Even though painful I wanted to share that story. People seeing the cost of the colonial legacy and the bosses bossing people around, and their acknowledgement of the tyranny of dictatorship, a kind of mental dictatorship that has been going for years. [They are] pinpointing that and daring to speak out about it to say ‘this is absurd, how long it is going to last?’ That for me is hopeful.” Nick Cunningham

IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary Pitched at the Forum in 2010

In Hannah Polak’s feature-length competition selection Something Better to Come, the terrain protagonist Yula inhabits could be on a remote planet in the outer Solar System. As it happens, it is a vast rubbish dump on the outskirts of Moscow, but no less cinematic for that. Polak returned there again and again over a period of 14 years to chart Yula’s development, and that of her family and friends, in the process creating an intensely moving tale of deprivation and gutsy survival. The film is presented in a series of chapters, beginning when Yula is ten. Beautiful, carefree and tomboyish, she rules the dump with her gang of friends. But over the years, the horrendous business of living in such squalor inevitably takes its toll. We see Yula and her comrades trade in objects for recycling, earning vodka for their pains. They smoke cigarettes made from newspaper. They eat herring and McDonalds food culled from domestic bin-liners. We see and hear evidence of sexual abuse and how the dump’s community is forced to survive freezing Moscow winters. And then Yula becomes pregnant. The only hope we have left, as an audience, is that the film’s title is prophetic. “For me, I took the camera and I was learning all the time while I was making this film, and I absolutely matured as a filmmaker,” states Polak. “But I didn’t only shoot the film. I would come to deliver help to the people of the garbage dump. I would take people to the hospital. Sometimes I would take food, medicines. I was trying to convince them that somehow or other they could enter orphanages. I tried to be present in the dump or in Yula’s life, not just to shoot my film. “And did I have an influence? I think yes. Yula told me how I would give them advice and was teaching them and telling them not to do things. ‘But the others didn’t take your advice,’ she told me. ‘When I am offered the chance I always take it and use it fully.’” Nick Cunningham IDFA Competition for Feature-Length

Panorama

Documentary

Pitched at the Forum in 2012

Pitched at the Forum in 2013

My Friend the Enemy When director Wanda Koscia refers to her contender in IDFA’s mid-length competition My Friend the Enemy as a “feelgood massacre movie”, she is only half joking.

The film follows a group of Poles as they return to an area in what is now Western Ukraine where for a long time Poles and Ukrainians lived peacefully side by side. Until 1943 that is, when – in the chaos following successive invasions by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – the Polish population was massacred by Ukrainian nationalists. “A few years ago, I was filming in Kiev and I got interested in Polish-Ukrainian relations, which is a very painful subject”, the director recalls. She started researching the subject, and quickly found that there were survivors of the massacre still living. “What particularly struck me”, she says, “is even these survivors – who have very bitter memories – as soon as I said I am interested in the people who saved you, ninety percent of them responded very positively. They said, ‘Yes, we should remember them’.” “These survivors feel their story hasn’t been told,” Koscia says. “I really wanted to tell the human story – and also the story of people who

tried to save Poles. It’s time to look at this painful history in a spirit of reconciliation. This film is about the possibility of reconciliation. There’s still a way to go, but there are people who are trying, who are not just remembering the hate.” “As I researched, I was also struck by a sense of déjà-vu,” the director says. “It was just like the ethnic cleansing that happened in the former Yugoslavia, or Rwanda. I wanted to ask the question, in a situation like that, how would you behave? A little bit of self-examination is a good thing.” Initially, Koscia planned to film the visiting Poles and the Ukrainians now living in the area separately, but she soon realised the interaction between the two groups was the heart of the film. “We thought, it’s got to be a meeting between Poles and Ukrainians. I’ve got to show that interrelation, which isn’t comfortable but there is at least an effort being made. It was important for me that they meet.” The resulting encounters are proof of how human being can rise above the most horrific atrocities and get along. Mark Baker IDFA Competition for Mid-Length Documentary

Program TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 1 1

9:00

Monday 24 November

TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 2 2

TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 3 3

TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 4 4

TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 5 5

TUSCHINSKI TUSCHINSKI 6 6

DE MUNT DE MUNT 9

DE MUNT DE MUNT 10

DE MUNT DE MUNT 11

DE MUNT DE MUNT 12

DE MUNT DE MUNT 13

EYE CINEMA EYE CINEMA 1

MELKWEG MELKWEG RABOZAAL RABOZAAL

9:00

09:45 Industry 09:45Screening Industry Screening 10:00

10:00 10:00

10:30

Rudolf vanRudolf den Berg van den Berg

The SaltThe of the SaltEarth of the Earth 11:00

Dutch Competition Dutch,Competition 95’ , 95’

Wim Wenders, Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Juliano Salgado Ribeiro Salgado Masters 11:00, 110’ Masters, 110’

11:00 11:15

12:00 12:00