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
KICKSTARTING THE BUSINESS IDFA’s Industry Office chief Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen looks back at 25 years of doing business at IDFA and assesses the current state of the documentary industry. Some 2,250 documentary professionals will head to Amsterdam for the 25th edition of IDFA, drawn by the Docs for Sale market and the Forum coproduction event, which will unveil the latest projects from the likes of Yoav Shamir, Lucy Walker and Raffaele Brunetti. It’s a far cry from the early days of the festival when a handful of producers and sales agents would do business over a beer at IDFA’s former hub, De Balie, says Van Nieuwenhuijzen. “The whole idea behind the festival when it launched in 1988 was to rebrand documentary as something exciting, that had a place on the big screen… we wanted to bring documentary back to the people and stimulate documentary culture”, she says. “To be really honest, we didn’t give much thought to industry events in the early years”, she continues. “The professionals attending were mainly filmmakers and producers and a handful of sales agents, like Jan Rofekamp and Jane Balfour”, she continues.
TURNING POINT The turning point came in 1993 with the launch of IDFA’s “first official industry event”, the Forum, explains Van Nieuwenhuijzen. “The Forum brought in the commissioners who had not really attended on a grand scale before, which in turn attracted more filmmakers hoping to find finance for their next project – it gave a huge boost to the festival”, she says. “At the time, the Forum was something very fresh and new – it really kickstarted things. It was the first time commissioners from different broadcasters got together and started looking at ways they could collaborate to make things happen.” Docs for Sale (DfS) followed three years later, born out of a rudimentary, nine-booth video library (dubbed ‘the dark room’) in the De Balie. The official market kicked off with 20 booths and a 223-title catalogue in 1996. This year, in its 17th edition, running November 16-23 at the Arti et Amicitiae arts club, DfS has a 500-title catalogue and some 60 digitised booths. In total, the Industry Office is expecting some 171 commissioners and TV buyers, 172 festival programmers, 145 distributors and
sales agents and another 121 film institute staff to hit Amsterdam this year for its various events. “It’s pretty much in line with last year”, comments DfS coordinator Laurien ten Houten. Since 2008, professionals have also been able to screen films throughout the year on DfS Online, which currently has some 210 active users.
DANCING WITH DRAGONS Among this year’s attendees are larger-than-usual Chinese and South African delegations. Van Nieuwenhuijzen notes the Chinese market is “opening up” to international documentaries, with state broadcaster CCTV launching a documentary channel last year and many other Sino broadcasters running dedicated channels. “The Chinese broadcasters have tended to focus on local, in-house documentaries, but they’re increasingly going to the big content markets and buying up a lot of stuff from the BBC and Discovery Channel. The next step is to have author-driven documentaries”, she says. China will be the focus of two industry panels. The first, ‘Meet the Chinese’, will give an overview of the country’s documentary scene with the participation of CCTV’s Shi Yan, the Shanghai TV Festival’s Xiao Wang and Beijing filmmaker Zhao Qi, who produced the 2009 VPRO IDFA best feature-length documentary winner Last Train Home by Lixin Fan and is competing in the First Appearance section with Fallen City, capturing the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake in the mountain city of Beichuan which killed 20,000 people. The second panel, ‘Dancing with the Dragons: Distribution in China’ will examine how to tap into China’s potential 1.3 billion strong audience. They are among 12 industry panels beginning on Thursday, covering a variety of topics ranging from the market for short films to finding a distributor.
INTERACTIVE The Industry Office is collaborating on the Interactive Documentary Conference taking place on Sunday (November 18), spearheaded by the New Media DocLab programme to mark its fifth anniversary. Speakers will include the Tate Modern’s Jane Burton, Elisabeth Holm of crowd-funding platform Kickstarter and Daniel Burwen, creator of the interactive graphic novel Operation Ajax. But while IDFA’s industry programme goes from strength to strength and attendance remains steady, Van Nieuwenhuijzen is all too aware that times remain tough for many in the documentary industry.
Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen
PHOTO: FELIX KALKMAN
NEW MODEL “There are no big changes in terms of attendance or the number of films submitted, but we know it’s getting harder and harder for producers as well as sales agents”, she says. “The broadcasters are paying less and less and while sales agents are increasingly trying to work with the new digital players, the amounts of money involved are relatively small”, she says. Van Nieuwenhuijzen notes state funding is also under pressure. In the Netherlands, for example, the government has just announced it is axing the Dutch Cultural Media Fund, a major funder of Dutch documentaries (see page 5). “People are just trying to hang in there, trying to survive and get their heads around the new business model, which is hard because there isn’t really a new business model as yet – it’s a highly uncertain time.” Melanie Goodfellow
SCHOOL FOR TALENT LOOK BACK AT IDFA IDFAcademy, the festival’s intensive four-day industry programme for emerging filmmakers and film students, opens its doors again on 15 November. The programme introduces newcomers to established documentary professionals from both creative and business sides of the doc trade, and offers a smorgasbord of masterclasses, lectures, plenary sessions, roundtable discussions and specialist case studies to the 160+ delegates from 40 countries in attendance. “There are so many top professionals here at IDFA, with so much knowledge and experience, with many many filmmakers just starting their careers”, points out Meike Statema, IDFA’s Education co-ordinator. “We wanted to bring them together in one programme, and take a real look at this new generation of documentary filmmakers. It’s not just about sharing knowledge, it’s about the shared experience too.” The first two days of IDFAcademy 2012 will focus on creative concerns, with key contributions from acclaimed US doc director Alan Berliner (Q&A following the screening of his IDFA competition title First Cousin Once Removed) and Sean McAllister (The Reluctant Revolutionary, IDFA 2012) who will examine the craft of ‘casting’ for character-driven films. Days three and four will then look squarely at business matters, with an examination of crowd-funding (and other forms of finance)
by filmmaker Steve James and producer Margarete Jangård, under the watchful eye of moderator Elisabeth Holm, as well as a high-level overview of cross-media production. A welcome return will be the highly popular Pitch & Trailer training session, which once again will conclude with a participant winning the opportunity to pitch his or her documentary project to an audience willing to voice its thoughts, advice and suggestions. Of course, key to the success of IDFAcademy is the high number of industry luminaries prepared to donate time and energy to share their experience and guide fledgling filmmakers towards a career in a testing and competitive field. “These professionals are invaluable, and are always happy to give us their time. For them, it is not a problem being asked to attend and contribute. I really like that, and I really appreciate that”, Statema concludes. Nick Cunningham
Jan Rofekamp, founding chief of sales company Films Transit, has been touching down at IDFA for more than two decades. When did you first start coming to IDFA? It must have been at the second or third IDFA, so 1989 or 1990. What have been your top titles at the festival? I have had many, many films at IDFA but off the top my head Shake Hands With Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dellaire (2004); The Most Dangerous Man in American (2009); Gimme Shelter (2001); A Promise to the Dead (2007); The Corporation (2003) and War Photographer (2001) – shall I go on? What’s your most remarkable moment at IDFA? The showing of A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, where Ariel and I saw each other again after so many years and his speech to me at the Films Transit dinner. I had not seen Ariel since he was exiled in Holland after the Chilean coup in 1973. He is a remarkable and extraordinarily gentle human being: I was truly moved to tears. What’s the biggest change in the doc industry over the past 25 years? The diminishing broadcaster interest in docs, especially for primetime. That is a problem as
Jan Rofekamp
PHOTO: FELIX KALKMAN
broadcast is the only revenue for filmmakers which is not speculation. Theatrical, DVD online and so forth is all speculation. One has just to hope people will come/watch. How many of Fred’s Bitter Balls have you eaten over the years? I have two IDFA addictions: Fred’s Bitter Balls – I eat at least two or three a day. And my stroll with Fred to the herring cart around the corner to enjoy a salted herring together! MG IDFA – 3
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DANISH DOCUMENTARIES
2012 THE
IDFA
SELECTIONS
Films Transit
COMPETITION
AT IDFA 2012 FEATURE-LENGTH COMPETITION
MY AFGHANISTAN
REFLECTING IMAGES
NAGIEB KHAJA
FEATURE-LENGTH COMPETITION
SOLAR MAMAS
MONA ELDAIEF, JEHANE NOUJAIM MID-LENGTH COMPETITION
A NORMAL LIFE MIKALA KROGH
REFLECTING IMAGES
FIRST APPEARANCE COMPETITION
MERCY, MERCY KATRINE KJÆR
FIRST APPEARANCE COMPETITION
DANCE FOR ME KATRINE PHILP
MUSIC COMPETITION
THE GHOST OF PIRAMIDA ANDREAS KOEFOED
REFLECTING IMAGES: MASTERS
FREE THE MIND PHIE AMBO
REFLECTING IMAGES: PANORAMA
THE RECORD BREAKER BRIAN MCGINN
SPECIAL FOCUS: WHY POVERTY?
STEALING AFRICA CHRISTOFFER GULDBRANDSEN
SELLING SOUTH AFRICA
A 33-strong contingent of South African documentary professionals descends on IDFA 2012 with twin objectives of promoting the country’s generous tax incentives for international producers and persuading Dutch counterparts at the Netherlands Film Fund to agree a formal co-pro treaty. The South African team will be led by producer Marc Schwinges, also a central figure within the South African Documentary Filmmakers Association, and Terrence Khumalo of the National Film & Video Foundation (NFVF). “We have an exceptional support mechanism from our government at present for trade missions,” commented Schwinges on the eve of the festival, “and another exceptional support mechanism in the form of a tax rebate which is 35% of what is spent in South Africa, in what they call ‘qualifying expenditure’, as a formal co-pro or as a South African production. It’s quite a hefty percentage of money spent in the country that comes back as a VAT-free, tax-free incentive, and can be cash-flowed as well. This has made it a lot more interesting to do business with South Africa because we bring a serious amount of money to the table.” South African filmmakers currently benefit from eight international co-production treaties (Canada, Germany, Italy, UK, France, NZ, Australia and Ireland). Given the historical and cultural ties with the Netherlands, it is perhaps surprising that such an agreement hasn’t been inked before. “Yes, it would seem that the Netherlands would have naturally been one of the first treaties we embarked upon, but we are working on rectifying that”, agrees NFVF’s Neilo Khunyeli. “The reason is we have had a lot of positive interest from Dutch producers. If you have a treaty in place, it makes it a whole lot more lucrative and a whole lot more attractive for both parties involved. There is a lot of room for co-operation. We are looking to a more cohesive and progressive discussion about what exactly the conditions would be and what each party is looking to get from the treaty.” Netherlands Film Fund CEO Doreen Boonekamp responded: “The Netherlands and South Africa share a fruitful co-operation in the field of feature film and drama production. We greatly appreciate such a large delegation of South African film professionals visiting the Netherlands now to take a closer look into the possibilities of expanding co-operation towards documentary film. I trust we can intensify our relations and exchanges with South Africa, resulting in an array of many interesting,
challenging and creative films. I also trust the 2005 Memorandum of Understanding between both countries can be replaced by a true co-production treaty’’. The Meet the South Africans panel (16 November, hosted by IDFA’s Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen) will present an overview of the South African doc-pro landscape to industry attendees. Other SA activities at IDFA include a stand at Docs for Sale, where 11 projects will be on offer to buyers, commissioning editors and festival programmers. One SA project will be presented at the Forum (Neil Brandt’s The Devil’s Lair), while Brandt and François Verster’s The Dream of Shahrazad will screen as a Forum Work in Progress. The NFVF invested 4.5 million Rand (€402,000) in doc development and production in 2012. This will rise to at least 7.8 million Rand (€697,000) in 2013 and 8.5 million Rand (€760,000) in 2014. A separate fund for archive will be launched in 2013. Nick Cunningham The Devil’s Lair
CUTTING CULTURE The Dutch documentary community has reacted with bafflement and anger to the shock decision by the new coalition government, on the eve of IDFA, to close down the Dutch Cultural Media Fund.
This Fund currently provides approximately €16 million annually for documentary, fiction, digital projects, radio and talent development. Of this, €8 million is devoted to documentary. 40 titles at this year’s IDFA were made with the Fund’s support, among them the opening film Wrong Time Wrong Place by John Appel. In all, the Fund backs around 70 documentaries a year. To the amazement of the sector, the new coalition Government is now planning to close the Fund down in four years’ time, in January 2017. Those at the helm of the Fund have expressed confusion over both the timing of the decision and the thinking behind it. “There had been no warning signs. I would like to stress that we have been encouraged in everything we have been doing and the two political parties that formed the coalition have nothing in their programme that indicates this should be done”, the Fund’s Director Hans Maarten van den Brink commented. “The way it was explained to me by a top government official is that this was a last-minute thing.” Wrong Time Wrong Place
“To be honest, I don’t believe it,” agreed IDFA director Ally Derks. “I really think that somewhere they made a mistake.” The implications for IDFA itself could be severe – if the move to close the Fund goes through, there will be a huge hole in Dutch documentary funding and consequently far fewer Dutch films that the Festival will be able to programme. During IDFA, every Fund-backed doc will screen with an extra credit saying ‘this film wouldn’t have been made without Media Fund support.’ Meanwhile, directors Aliona van der Horst and Robert Oey will be working on a special movie during the Festival that will involve them interviewing international guests and asking them how much they value Dutch documentary. A petition has also been launched, calling on the Government to reconsider its decision. Meanwhile, a report from accountants BDO that the Fund is expected to publish shortly will provide data suggesting two thirds of Dutch doc production is now under threat and that 300 fulltime jobs could now be lost. It is understood that new Dutch Culture Minister Jet Bussemaker is sympathetic to the documentary sector’s concerns (the decision was made before her appointment), but her Ministry was not willing to be interviewed on the subject at this stage. The Dutch public broadcasters have also emphasised their continuing commitment to documentary, pledging to “take over a large part of the financing of high-quality drama and artistic documentaries from the Media Fund” (according to Dutch daily De Volkskrant, Tuesday 13 November). “I think they didn’t realise what was really at stake when they closed down the Media Fund,” the Fund’s Documentary Head Ingrid van Tol commented. In the short term, it will remain business at normal at the Fund. Hans Maarten van den Brink acknowledges that the four-year delay in closing the Media Fund will give its supporters time to try to save it. “But a decision once taken is hard to overturn.” The Director added that he and his colleagues have been “overwhelmed” by the support they’ve received “not only from the film and documentary world, but from museums, from the general audience, from opinion-makers. We didn’t know we were so popular!” Geoffrey Macnab
FOCUS FORWARD FIRSTS
New York-based short film distributor Cinelan is back at IDFA to unveil the latest shorts to come out of its Focus Forward initiative, consisting of 30 three-minute films looking at innovative people or companies as a catalyst for positive change and progress in the world. Six new films will world premiere at IDFA including Victor Kossakovsky’s DisplAir about a young Russian Steve Jobslike technology entrepreneur; Alex Gibney’s visually beautiful Speaking with Light, about a marine scientist’s pioneering work to use bioluminescence as a means to highlight pollution in the sea, and Steve James’ The Music Man about Chineseborn inventor GE Wang. “When we hit IDFA last year, not a single film in the series had been made”, says Cinelan co-founder Karol MarteskoFenster. “We had announced the programme at Toronto, but we arrived at IDFA with a more robust idea of what we wanted to do with the help of Peter Wintonick and the other folks at the festival, we were able to get the word out there.” The new films in the series will premiere ahead of selected features in the festival line-up. All of the Focus Forward shorts produced to date – 24 in total – will screen free to the public in a mini-cinema on the Rembrandtplein from midday to 8pm each day. “As we celebrate all aspects of documentary culture over the next eleven days, it seems only natural to integrate a programme about innovation that itself is highly innovative and smart about the power of the internet”, says IDFA chief Ally Derks. Martesko-Fenster, who is at IDFA with managing director Douglas Dicconson, will also participate in an industry panel on how to sell shorts using new distribution models and platforms. Alongside the core series of 30 shorts by established directors, Cinelan is also running a competition open to anyone who wants to submit a three-minute film fitting the Focus Forward brief. The submission period is now closed but Cinelan announced on Wednesday that viewing and voting for the Audience Favorite award is now open on Vimeo. A selection of 95 semi-finalists is in the running for the award. Finalists for the competition’s five cash prizes – worth a total $200,000, including a $100,000 Grand Jury Prize – will be announced on the Focus Forward website on November 28. A jury featuring Joe Berlinger, Daryl Hannah, Barbara Kopple and IDFA’s Wintonick will reveal the winners at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013. Melanie Goodfellow
IDFA HISTORY IN BRIEF
PART I: 1988 – 1992
Early editions of IDFA unfolded against the backdrop of the fall of Communism and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Prize winners such as Ivars Seleckis’ Crossroads Street, about a down-at-heel neighbourhood in the Latvian capital of Riga, and Marina Goldovskaya’s The Power of Solovki, the first Soviet film to talk about the Gulag camps, reflected the changes afoot on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Taking advantage of the new era of perestroika and glasnost brought in by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, festival founder Ally Derks travelled to Moscow and Saint Petersburg in search of films for the 1988 and 1989 editions – these trips resulted in a huge Soviet delegation rocking up at the festival in 1989, just weeks after the fall of Berlin Wall. “We selected 15 films, but the filmmakers turned up with another 40 films that had been shelved before Perestroika, we had no idea what was in these film cans, but we just opened them and showed them in the Film Museum”, says Derks. “It was so funny.] I can still see these people coming into the Balie, it was after the opening film, so everyone was already partying and drinking and then the Russian delegation came in carrying all these film cans. We were like ‘What’s in the cans?’ We thought at first it was food and alcohol, but it was old 35mm films.” MG IDFA – 5
SMASH & GRAB – THE STORY OF THE PINK PANTHERS
IN THE DARK ROOM
We haven’t exactly been short of films and books about Carlos the Jackal, a terrorist who (with the collusion of the media) has become a near mythical figure. However, Nadav Schirman’s new feature doc isn’t simply adding to the pile. This is a personal and emotional story, with its focus on the Jackal’s wife and lover, Magdalena Kopp. “I had a little bit of apprehension before contacting her,” Schirman acknowledges of the photographer and former terrorist. He is Jewish, the son of an Israeli diplomat. He was all too aware that Kopp’s parents had been Nazis and that terrorist groups of the 1970s had often targeted Israel. “As a kid, because we lived under the constant threat of Arab terrorism, it marked my childhood. I had two figures who marked my childhood – Arafat and Carlos. And I knew she had trained with Palestinian terrorists.” To his surprise, when Schirman sat down with Kopp, he felt “an immediate sense of empathy.” He began to realise that she was as much a victim as a perpetrator. Kopp was never a diehard terrorist. She made a series of “wrong decisions” which left her stranded in a relationship with Carlos which she wasn’t able to leave. In the Dark Room is part of a loose trilogy that began with The Champagne Spy (2007), about James Bond-like Mossad agent Major Ze’ev Gur Arie and will continue with Son Of Hamas, based on the memoir by Mosab Hassan Yousef (who worked undercover for the Israeli Secret Service). Schirman’s film portrait of Kopp is as much a character study as a doc about international terrorism, inviting Carlos’ wife to look back on where and how her life went astray. Why did Kopp become involved with Carlos in the first place? The documentary makes clear she was repelled by him when he first approached her, in a darkroom. “I think Carlos was the alpha male. She was attracted to him in that sense. She never
really planned to go underground. All of a sudden, she came back from the training camps in Yemen and everybody around her was ‘wanted.’” From being an “after hours” terrorist combining political activities with a relatively normal life, Kopp found herself on the run, living underground. At this point, Carlos became ever more important to her. He gave her a sense of security. He was charming and charismatic, but also intensely controlling and possessive In the Dark Room isn’t just Kopp’s story. It also features Rosa, her daughter by Carlos, who hardly knows her father but goes to visit him in jail. One character who isn’t interviewed is Carlos himself. The director tried to set up an interview, and Carlos wanted to appear. “He was quite open to it, but right before his trial it was impossible to get permission to film him.” Nonetheless, his encounter with Rosa (described by her) provides a poignant and revealing coda to the doc – one which shows just how badly family life and terrorism go together. Geoffrey Macnab
IDFA COMPETITION FOR FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY In The Dark Room – Nadav Schirman Fri 16/11, 11:45, Munt 13 (industry screening) Sun 18/11, 10:00, Munt 11 Sun 18/11, 19:30, Munt 09 Tue 20/11, 22:15, Munt 11 Thu 22/11, 19:45, Munt 13 Fri 23/11, 10:45, Tuschinski 5
WRONG TIME WRONG PLACE Dutch documentary maker and IDFA favourite John Appel had been planning a film dealing with “luck, coincidence or fate” for some time; he found out that, if you go looking for coincidence, it often comes looking for you.
“I have always been interested in this theme, and it’s one that has played a big role in my own life,” the director says. “In The Player [IDFA 2009], I really concentrated on gambling, but Wrong Time Wrong Place is about a different side of luck – you could maybe say fate, rather than luck.” “I was looking for some kind of disaster that could serve as the starting point for this film. It could be a plane crash or a boat disaster; I wasn’t interested in why the disaster happened, but in the consequences for the victims and in particular the role played by chance. Who survives such as disaster, and who doesn’t.” Two weeks after his project had been approved for funding by the Dutch Film Fund, Anders Breivik carried out his deadly attacks in Norway. At first, the filmmaker was hesitant about taking on an event of this type, but he decided to go to Norway and see what happened – and after all, chance had dropped this subject into his lap. “If I’d focussed on Breivik, it would give the impression the film is about why he did it. But I was totally not interested in the circumstances that made him do this. He’s a kind of ‘miracle figure’ in the film”, Appel says of the mass murderer, who appears only briefly in his film. “For the victims – the people I am interested in – it’s irrelevant whether the disaster was planned by someone or not. For them, it just happened, and it’s a matter of chance whether they get caught up in it or not – and whether they survive.” “The first character I found was Hakon,” Appel says. “Apart from being on the boat to Utøya with Breivik, he hid during the massacre with two other people – they formed a group by
chance and were able to survive. Not only did this give me another coincidence, it also allowed me to bring their three stories together.” “It was also an amazing coincidence that I managed to find Ritah, the young Ugandan woman who hid with Hakon”, he continues. “I had looked for her in Uganda and couldn’t find her. When I returned, it turned out she had applied for political asylum in the Netherlands!” Another remarkable coincidence occurred when the filmmaker was looking for footage of base jumping to close the film. “I was looking for more base jumping footage and I found this great footage – then the guy who is on it suddenly started telling me he had escaped from the 22 July attacks by going base jumping instead of to work in the government offices in Oslo. What are the odds?” “I am now thinking of making a completely coincidental film,” the director adds. “Really starting from nothing at all. It’s just an idea at the moment, and it’s hard to say anything about it specifically, because, ehm – there are no specifics....” Wrong Time Wrong Place opens this year’s IDFA, and not only in Amsterdam – the film premieres simultaneously in 25 cinemas throughout the Netherlands. The premiere in Amsterdam will be followed by an extended Q&A with John Appel.
They’re the highly skilled diamond robbers whose outrageous jewellery heists around the world leave even the most fast-paced Hollywood crime capers looking leaden-footed. On the face of it, they’re also Robin Hood types, stealing from the very rich. Welcome to the Pink Panthers: the subjects of the new doc from Havana Marking (Afghan Star). Through journalists in Serbia and Montenegro, Marking tracked down some of these illustrious thieves. Although they depend on secrecy, the Panthers turned out to have a hankering to talk about their robberies. Flattered by a recent New Yorker profile, they enjoyed the publicity and also relished the chance to unburden themselves to a director they trusted. “The New Yorker piece actually quite inspired the Pink Panthers themselves. It was the first time they had officially been given the title ‘the world’s most successful diamond thieves,’” Marking recalls of her ventures to the Balkans to meet them. Her film features some truly astonishing surveillance footage from Pink Panther heists. It wasn’t a huge challenge to get hold of this material, the director acknowledges. Police agencies simply gave it to her. Countering stereotypes of Balkan machismo, the Pink Panthers included women as well as men in their ranks. “Everyone always thinks it is always men, men, men... but without women, nothing would get done,” one interviewee (disguised by animation) discloses. In the build-up to raids, she would often dress in the most expensive designer clothes and travel in chauffeur-driven cars. Marking makes it clear that the Pink Panthers weren’t simply dashing action-heroes. “By the end of the film, it is very clear that these are people with guns, terrifying people.” The Panthers are at the “more civilised end” of Balkan mafia society. They don’t deal in drugs or run prostitution rackets. The police seem to enjoy the challenge of tracking them down, especially given their recent success in apprehending many of them. Nonetheless, as Marking unravelled the chain of command and worked out who was selling the diamonds, she realised they were closely linked to more thuggish groups. There is also evidence of a generational shift. Whereas the original Panthers were super-slick and professional, their younger successors tend to be more headstrong and trigger-happy. Some of the thieves (among them main character Mike) have already seen the doc. To Marking’s relief, they liked it. “It’s definitely nice to know that they’re not going to be banging on my doors saying ‘you’ve misrepresented me,’” she reflects. “We worked very hard to make sure there was nothing in the film that ties them to a crime; there is nothing that can be evidence in court and once you’ve got the trust, they really enjoying talking to you. Obviously, it’s top secret. They can’t even tell their wives what they do!” Geoffrey Macnab
IDFA COMPETITION FOR FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY Smash & Grab – The Story Of The Pink Panthers Havana Marking Thu 15/11, 14:00, Tuschinski 3 (industry screening) Tue 20/11, 18:00, Munt 10 Wed 21/11, 22:00, Tuschinski 1 Sat 24/11, 10:00, Munt 11 Sun 25/11, 12:45, Tuschinski 6
Mark Baker
IDFA COMPETITION FOR FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY Wrong Time Wrong Place – John Appel Thu 15/11, 12:45, Tuschinski 2 Fri 16/11, 13:30, Munt 13 (industry screening) Sat 17/11, 21:00, Munt 09 Sun 18/11, 10:00, Munt 11 Thu 22/11, 17:30, EYE Cinema 1 Sat 24/11, 10:00, Tuschinski 1 Sat 24/11, 10:00, Tuschinski 2 Sat 24/11, 14:15, Brakke Grond Expozaal
IDFA – 7
The Netherlands Film Festival presents:
Holland Film Meeting The annual get-together of Dutch and foreign film professionals September 26th - 30th 2013, Utrecht Netherlands Production Platform / NFF International Screenings Workshops & panels / Cinema Militans Lecture Binger-Screen International Interview / Digital Film Library For more information please contact: • Holland Film Meeting P.O. Box 1581, 3500 BN Utrecht, The Netherlands Vinkenburgstraat 19 bis, 3512 AA Utrecht, The Netherlands +31 30 230 38 00 hfm@filmfestival.nl • Signe Zeilich-Jensen Head of Industry Holland Film Meeting +31 6 129 904 56 Signe@filmfestival.nl filmfestival.nl/profs_en
ANKTHANK YOU IDFA YOU IDFA ANK THANK YOUSUPPORTING IDFA YOU IDFA R SUPPORTING FOR RCUMENTARIES SUPPORTING FOR SUPPORTING DOCUMENTARIES CUMENTARIES DOCUMENTARIES D BRINGING AND BRINGING D BRINGING AND BRINGING TOGETHER. US TOGETHER. TOGETHER. US TOGETHER.
evision andRTS Radio – Swiss Television and Radio d / GaspardIrène Lamunière Challand / Miruna / Gaspard Coca-Cozma Lamunière / Miruna Coca-Cozma
evision andRTS Radio – Swiss Television and Radio d / GaspardIrène Lamunière Challand / Miruna / Gaspard Coca-Cozma Lamunière / Miruna Coca-Cozma
HOUSEMAIDS
THE STAIRCASE 2: THE LAST CHANCE
Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro captures the economic and social changes sweeping his country through a series of fly-on-the-wall video portraits by seven teenagers of their housemaids, touching also on how this tradition has its roots in the slave trade of another era. The film is the latest snapshot of life in Brazil from 29-yearold producer and director Mascaro, whose previous works include High-rise and Defiant Brasilia. According to 2010 statistics from the Brazilian Labour Ministry, some seven million women are employed as housemaids in Brazil, accounting for 15% of the world’s domestic staff. But as Brazil rises to be one of the biggest economies in the world, the expectations of its population are changing and the number of women prepared to go into service is on the wane. Many of the housemaid subjects in the film have been with their families since they were teenagers; one or two them entering employment when they were just eleven years old. “The housemaid is a sort of institution in Brazil. Everyone has one, not just the upper middle classes, but also the lower middle classes too. In fact, one of the teenagers who did the filming is actually the daughter of a housemaid. She films the housemaid who looks after her home while her mother is out at work”, says Mascaro. “For me, the phenomenon of the Brazilian housemaid was a good way to explore the contradictions in Brazilian society. The country has one of the biggest economies in the world today. Society is changing but there are still huge inequalities in terms of wealth and expectations. I thought the position and existence of the housemaid in our society was a good way to explore this”, he continues. “The reporters were young Brazilians between 15 to 17 years of age. I think it’s an interesting age – they’re starting to reflect on social issues but at the same time they are very, very connected to their maids, who have been with their families for years. They have this extremely complex relationship with the maids, who are at once an employee of the family but also a sort of family member”, he adds. Mascaro ended up with hundreds of hours of footage and spent a year and a half editing the documentary. “In total, we were following 25 characters from across Brazil, each one generating some 50 hours of footage”, he says. “It was a lot of work to organise the material; we
Oscar-winning French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade revisits the case of Michael Peterson, a Tennessee writer and politician who was convicted in 2003 of murdering his wife Kathleen after she was found in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs in their vast family home.
dealt with it on a week-by-week basis as the new footage came in.” Aside from Housemaids, Marscaro has a second film at IDFA, Ebb and Flow, which screens in the Reflecting Images – Panorama section. The 28-minute film follows a young deaf father living on the outskirts of Recife in Brazil, without comment or interviews. Beyond making documentaries, Mascaro is developing his first feature film, Bull Down!, with support from the Hubert Bals Fund. Melanie Goodfellow IDFA COMPETITION FOR FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY Housemaids – Gabriel Mascaro Fri 16/11, 17.45, Munt 13 (industry screening) Fri 16/11, 21.45, Tuschinski 1 Sat 17/11, 18.45, Munt 10 Sun 18/11, 19.45, Tuschinski 5 Thurs 22/11, 11.15, Munt 13 Friday 23/11, 21.45, Munt 13
FIRST COUSIN ONCE REMOVED
Alan Berliner’s IDFA competition selection First Cousin Once Removed may be a complex and moving film about an everyday tragedy that befalls many – the chronic memory loss that follows the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease – but the ‘first cousin, once removed’ of the title was no everyday figure. Edwin Honig was a celebrated poet, academic and translator who was twice knighted for his services to literature: first by the president of Portugal in 1986, and then by the King of Spain a decade later. Shot over a five-year period before the poet’s death in 2011, there are many surprising elements within Berliner’s film. Despite an inability to recall faces, facts or events, Honig’s propensity for communicating in pure lyric remains a constant. Time and again, Honig will respond to a question with a clever, playful and essentially impromptu rhyme, or will encapsulate a sequence of thoughts in metaphor. Of his diminishing memory he tells how, “I have no night of what I knew in the morning.” When he is shown footage of himself as a vital and articulate academic, he intones that “who I am and who I was are two contrasting dreams.” When he is playing with Berliner’s son Eli (himself a subject within the director’s documentary Wide Awake, IDFA 2006), the poet implores the boy to “take me for a ride in your story.” “He was a master of words”, observes Berliner. “I never once went to him and spoke to him when I didn’t walk away amazed and touched and moved by some of the things that he said. Whatever happened to him, he always maintained the essence of his poetic bearing, and that was always a profound thing.” Inevitably, such an intensive study will be revelatory, and this film is no different. Among all of Honig’s lost memories, one that remains painfully unforgotten was the death of his younger brother at the age of three, run over by a car. Honig’s father blamed him for the tragedy, and the incident resonated in later life when relations soured between Honig and his own foster sons. In the film, both sons articulate their bitterness about their father’s treatment of them. “The spectre of his own childhood and the way his father blamed him, obviously there was some reworking of his child-
hood trauma, and that is always in the air (within the film)”, stresses Berliner. “He was a critical person and I think his son put it as succinctly as anyone when he said that the qualities that made him a very good critic didn’t make him a very good father.” Nevertheless, at the core of the film is a relationship between the director and his subject born out of familial love and mutual admiration. “Edwin was in many ways a collaborator with me and this film is in many ways a duet”, stresses Berliner. “You can feel the love we have for one another. He might be the subject of the film, he may even be the object of the film, but he’s also the coauthor in many ways, and I saw the possibility along with him to make a film that really would address the fragility of being human, and the deep dark spectre of mortality and ultimately, above all else, the profound role of memory, or the loss of it, in our lives. Memory is the glue of life.”
The original murder trial was at the heart of Lestrade’s hit 2004 HBO-backed miniseries The Staircase. This new one-off documentary revolves around the retrial, which began in December 2011. The Staircase series was born from Lestrade’s Oscar-winning film Murder On A Sunday Morning, following a murder trial in which a poor African-American teenager was wrongly accused of a murder in 2000. “HBO wanted me to do something else in a similar vein”, explains Lestrade. “I wasn’t convinced I could produce something as strong again on a similar subject; I decided to look for a story which was the opposite of Murder On A Sunday Morning – a rich, white person accused of committing a murder in a family setting. HBO gave me $30,000 to develop the project and, along with producer Allyson Luchak, we set up a group of researchers to look for such a case.” After about three months, the researchers came across the Peterson affair. All Lestrade knew about Peterson prior to their first meeting was that he was white, a writer and had once run for mayor in his hometown of Durham. “On meeting him, it very quickly became apparent to me that there was this almost Shakespearian dimension to Michael Peterson; a sort of ambivalence and a complexity in his character. I thought there would be dramatic turns of events in the trial, just like in a Shakespeare play.” Lestrade’s hunch proved correct. During the trial, details of Peterson’s bisexuality and extra-marital affairs emerged, and the prosecutor also delved into the case of another close friend who had also been found dead at the bottom of the stairs. “On one level, the series was about whether Peterson was guilty or not; on another, what really interested me was the motivations of the prosecution […] I had the impression he was being tried more for his private life, which they regarded as deviant, than the murder of his wife”, Lestrade says. The Staircase 2 re-explores this angle in more depth as defence lawyer David Rudolf pulls apart the evidence from the first trial. Interestingly, Rudolf builds his case using Lestrade’s rushes from the first series. “I stayed in contact with Peterson and his lawyer over the years. I was never totally convinced of Peterson’s innocence, and I told him this on several occasions, but I was convinced he should never have been convicted, because there was no evidence”, says Lestrade. Lestrade is now considering a third film exploring new evidence that has come to light since the very first trial in 2002. “Another theory that has emerged recently is that she was attacked by an owl; it’s not unheard of in the area. It may sound improbable, but it’s totally credible. I would like to make a third film looking at this theory in detail”, says Lestrade. Alongside The Staircase 2, the mini-series The Staircase also screens at IDFA. Melanie Goodfellow
IDFA COMPETITION FOR FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY The Staircase 2. The Last Chance – Jean-Xavier de Lestrade Thurs 15/11, 15.45, Tuschinski 3 (industry screening) Wed 21/11, 16.15, Tuschinski 1 Thurs 22/11, 19.45, Tuschinski 4 Fri 29/11, 14.00, Tuschinski 2 Sat 24/11, 21.00, Munt 11
Nick Cunningham
IDFA COMPETITION FOR FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY First Cousin Once Removed – Alan Berliner Fri 16/11, 15:45, Tuschinski 2 Sat 17/11, 11:45, Munt 12 (industry screening) Sun 18/11, 22:30, Munt 10 Tue 20/11, 11:30, Tuschinski 1 Thu 22/11, 18:00, Tuschinski 1 Sat 24/11, 10:00 ,Tuschinski 1 Sat 24/11, 10:00, Tuschinski 2 Sun 25/11, 16:30, Tuschinski 2
IDFA – 9