ADDING UNDERSTANDING IDFA opening film director John Appel will join documentary makers Eyal Sivan, Sean McAllister, Marije Meerman and Suzanne Raes in kicking-off the industry panel talks today with a discussion on the use of found footage in documentaries, entitled ‘Found Footage in the YouTube Era’.
Ally Derks
PHOTO: NICHON GLERUM
MONEY-GO-ROUND “The only thing I didn’t want to do – I didn’t want to talk about money!” IDFA Director Ally Derks tells Geoffrey Macnab as she contemplates the 25th anniversary edition of IDFA.
This weekend, the festival will be hosting Congress: Dutch Docs Conquer the World! as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations. Derks’ idea was for Dutch and international professionals to brainstorm about their craft, sharing their ideas and passions. Nonetheless, she acknowledges that doc funding is bound to be on the agenda. Given the cutbacks facing the arts sector in the Netherlands, any interview with the IDFA boss about the event she has run for quarter of a century soon boomerangs back to budgets. The Festival begins just weeks after the new Dutch coalition government’s shock decision to close down the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, one of the essential props of documentary making in the Netherlands (see story on page 5), and not so long after the Jan Vrijman Fund (IDFA’s long-running initiative to support documentary filmmaking in developing countries) was reconstituted as the IDFA Fund.
OPTIMISM The Festival is also having to deal with a 5% budget cut, “like all the other cultural institutions.”Derks’ dismay at the closure of the Dutch Cultural Media Fund is self-evident (“to be honest, I still don’t believe it – I really think that somewhere they made a mistake”), but in her usual ebullient style, the IDFA boss is looking for the positives. As she notes, the Dutch excel at documentary. She can’t accept that, in the long run, the government would risk destroying such a strong sector. As for the IDFA Fund, the Festival has secured an important backer for the next three years in the Bertha Fund. Any talk about the Fund’s future being in doubt has now been scotched. “That means so much to us!” The arrival of new sponsor Marie-StellaMaris is likewise a source of optimism. All in all, Derks believes, “looking at other cultural institutions, we are very lucky.”
STRONG COMPETITION Derks talks up this year’s IDFA competition with enthusiasm. She would have liked to have shown Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, but it slipped out of her grasp. Otherwise, she has
managed to secure the titles she most wanted, in spite of fierce competition from fiction festivals such as Cannes and Berlin. Given that this is a jubilee year, she was keen to open the festival with a Dutch movie and she cites John Appel’s Wrong Time Wrong Place as an excellent way to get this year’s event rolling. “I thought this is great ... our talent John Appel made a great film again! I think that overall, and not just in competition, it is a strong year”, she states. Plenty of colourful guests are expected in Amsterdam, including pop stars (Rick Springfield), former terrorists (Magdalena Kopp), Flamenco dancers and a group of Rwandan drummers.
PARTY It goes without saying that IDFA will be having a party to celebrate its quarter century. On Saturday, there will be a huge celebration in the Melkweg venue, with bands, DJs, films and a very long guest list. “I hope we will go dancing and drinking and having a ball that evening”, she states. There are also plenty of jubilee events in the festival programme. Overall, the programme has contracted a little. “More theatres, less films” is the mantra as the festival explores some new venues (among them the startling new EYE building on the River IJ). For practical and economic reasons, Derks is scheduling fewer titles. “We are showing 30 or 40 films less”, Derks says. “The more films, the more complicated it gets for us.” The festival Talkshows have been scrapped this year, to be replaced by extended Q&As with directors after screenings of their films.
“We want to look at the issue from two perspectives: firstly, the value of the material to the documentary-maker, and secondly the added value of the documentary-maker when he or she uses this material”, says Ingrid van Tol, head of the documentary department at the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, which is organising the event with the Dutch Association of Film and TV professionals and the Dutch Film and Television Academy. “People sometimes suggest that documentary makers are superfluous in an era when there is so much material capturing real-life events on the web … but the documentary maker can add an extra level of understanding and meaning in their use of this material”, adds Van Tol. Appel’s Wrong Time Wrong Place, for example, which deals with the killing of 77 people in attacks in Oslo and on the Norwegian island of Utøya by extremist Anders Breivik in 2011, makes use of found footage. “He uses images from the mobile phones of the children who were shot on the island – we see these films but he adds another layer. His film is a contemplative work, more about fate and coincidence than the incident itself ”, says Van Tol. The idea for the panel, says Van Tol, was born partly out of lectures given by Sivan as current artist in residence at the Dutch Film and Television Academy. “His lectures don’t look so much at his own work but rather at how students can use the material they find online and the added value of the documentary maker”, says Van Tol. A number of Sivan’s past documentaries such as Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork and The Specialist were made almost entirely from archive footage. His latest work, the exhibition Towards a Common Archive/ Filmed Testimonies by Zionist Fighters in 1948, which is currently on show in Tel Aviv, combines fresh interviews with former Israeli fighters with clips of documentaries by filmmakers and feature film representations of the events leading up of the creation of Israel in 1948 that involved the expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians. The Found Footage in the YouTube Era panel is the first of 12 industry panels taking place at IDFA over the coming week. Friday’s panels are devoted to the South African documentary scene and how to make a funding trailer. Melanie Goodfellow
GOOD INVESTMENT
GONG TIME, GONG PLACE
At other festivals in the Netherlands, box-office has been down, partly because of the financial crisis. Derks isn’t complacent about audience numbers at IDFA but is relieved that early ticket sales seem brisk. The outrageous decision to abolish the Dutch Cultural Media Fund notwithstanding, she argues that this is still a robust period for documentary in the Netherlands – and that it will only get better. As for the ongoing financial challenges IDFA and every other arts event in the Netherlands faces, Derks is convinced that, at the age of 25, the Festival is easily mature enough to cope. “It is always good to be under threat in a way. It makes you re-think what you are doing and [whether] you are investing the money in the right way,” she states.
Prior to the screening of the opening film, John Appel’s Wrong Time Wrong Place at the opening of the 25th IDFA in Pathé Tuschinski, chair of the Dutch Cultural Media Fund Jacob Kohnstamm announced the winner of the Media Fund Documentary Award 2012: Tomas Kaan receives the € 125,000 award towards the realisation of his film plan Wij zijn 18. IDFA founder and director Ally Derks also received the Frans Banninck Cocq Medal – an award granted to individuals “who have made an exceptional contribution to Amsterdam over a period of at least ten years” – from Amsterdam alderman Carolien Gehrels for her services to the city of Amsterdam. IDFA – 1