SEE NL 29

#Doc Issue

IDFA nod for The Pilot’s Mask by Simonka de Jong Retel Helmrich and Gorter in IDFA Competition Fifteen films in Dutch Competition First Appearance for Polaroid doc Instant Dreams Kids & Docs/ DocLab go from strength to strength Ally departs IDFA

Issue #29 November 2017 IDFA issue

Index 4-5 Return of the master Leonard Retel Helmrich is back in IDFA Competition with The Long Season

28-29 Behind the mask In The Pilot’s Mask Simonka de Jong gains access to the national children’s cancer centre in Utrecht

6-7 Monster or messiah? Jessica Gorter competes in IDFA Competition with The Red Soul, about modern Russia’s complicated relationship with Stalin

30-31 Mumbai massacre Having spent time there as a child, Carina Molier goes Back to the Taj Mahal Hotel, scene of a devastating terror attack in 2008

8-9 Close Ally After 30 years at the helm, Ally Derks is leaving IDFA. She speaks to See NL about three glorious decades

32-33 The boy in the middle My Name is Nobody director Denise Janzee sets out to unravel a mystery surrounding two of Italian cinema’s most legendary figures

10-11 Snap happy Willem Baptist’s feature doc debut Instant Dreams investigates the strange and continuing allure of the Polaroid

34-35 Dutch masters Top Dutch talent features prominently in IDFA 2017 Masters and Panorama sections

12-13 Prince among the deaf Alex de Ronde’s poignant study of his deaf son plays in IDFA Dutch Competition 14-15 After you’re gone… Two films selected for IDFA Dutch Documentary Competition deal acutely with the pain of loss and disappearance, Jaap van Hoewijk’s Piet is Gone and Garden of Life by Marco Niemeijer 16-19 Kids 4 Docs 4 Kids IDFA’s Meike Statema discusses the festival’s dedication to the kids’ doc sector

36-37 Digital rituals Experimental DocLab and the Film Fund strengthen their ties at IDFA 2017 38-39 Safe haven Chinese-Dutch producer Jia Zhao discusses her Lady of the Harbour in Dutch Competition, about a little known exodus from China to Europe in the 1990s 40 Director profile Dutch filmmaker Jessica Gorter, whose The Red Soul is selected for IDFA Competition

20-21 Good lieutenant Ramon Gieling is back in IDFA Dutch Comp with the complex Fatum (Room 216), which centres on the calm but effective interrogation of a murder suspect 22-23 Against the ropes Victor Vroegindeweij is in Dutch Competition with The Last Fight, a dramatic portrait of Dutch MMA star Marloes Coenen 24-25 Suffer the child Maasja Ooms’ IDFA debut is an intense study of a girl who has spent most of her life in care 26-27 Three’s company HALAL Docs has three films in IDFA 2017 selection.

See NL reports

The Red Soul

Jessica Gorter See page 6

2

COLOPHON See NL is published four times per year by EYE International and The Netherlands Film Fund and is distributed to international film professionals.

Editors in chief: Marten Rabarts, Lisa Linde Nieveld (EYE), Jonathan Mees (Netherlands Film Fund) Executive editor: Nick Cunningham Contributor: Geoffrey Macnab Concept & Design: Lava.nl, Amsterdam Layout: def., Amsterdam Printing: mediaLiaison Printed on FSC paper © All rights reserved: The Netherlands Film Fund and EYE International 2017 CONTACT Sandra den Hamer CEO EYE E sandradenhamer@eyefilm.nl Marten Rabarts Head of EYE International E martenrabarts@eyefilm.nl EYE International PO BOX 74782 1070 BT Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 758 2375 W www.eyefilm.nl Doreen Boonekamp CEO Netherlands Film Fund E d.boonekamp@filmfonds.nl Jonathan Mees Communications Netherlands Film Fund E j.mees@filmfonds.nl Netherlands Film Fund Pijnackerstraat 5 1072 JS Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 570 7676 W www.filmfonds.nl

Cover: The Pilot’s Mask Simonka de Jong See page 28

3

Return of the master place. His producer Pieter van Huystee, who has now completed the film, spent two months mulling over the project before deciding that he should try to finish it. (Proceeds from the documentary will go toward Retel Helmrich’s care.)

Leonard Retel Helmrich

During the shooting of his new film The Long Season in Lebanon earlier this year, multiple award-winning director Leonard Retel Helmrich had a heart attack. He went for 9 minutes without oxygen, which left him in a coma. After a month, he was transported back home to Holland where he is recovering slowly.

Retel Helmrich is one of the giants of international documentary, an inventor as well as a director, and pioneer of single shot cinema.

The Long Season follows the daily lives of Syrian refugees in Majdal Anjar, where they were staying in tents within a camp. The project started as a TV documentary but Retel Helmrich soon decided to make it as a real film, staying in Lebanon for over a year. “If you belong to the refugees, you can only be surprised at the resilience of people in these humiliating circumstances,” Retel Helmrich had previously said of his subjects.

The director, working with Syrian artist and sculptor Ramia Suleiman, had already shot much of the material and a four-hour timeline was in

“Last weekend Leonard saw the film,” revealed Van Huystee in early November. “He is now able to slowly express himself by pointing out letters on a letter board. He ‘said’ it’s a good expression of single shot cinema. And then put his thumb up to me. As you can imagine we were very moved by it.”

The producer explains how Retel Helmrich approached The Long Season in his usual fluid, free­ wheeling fashion, with long, elaborate shots in which the filmmaker gets very close to his subjects and follows them at their most intimate moments. “He was very joyful, with a very young spirit,” Van Huystee remembers of the shoot. Retel Helmrich would encourage others to use the camera too, encouraging them and training them in the techniques he had pioneered. As in his previous films, notably The Position Among the Stars, the director gives an insider’s view of his subjects very different from the detached, observational style of so many other documentary makers. In particular, he shows the perspective of the women and the children inside the camps.

Suleiman lived in the Netherlands during the editing, staying in

4

Van Huystee’s home. Van Huystee points out that the biggest influence on the post-production was the director himself. Retel Helmrich is a teacher as well as a filmmaker and has given many workshops and lectures. “In that sense, we know his thoughts about how to cut, when to cut and what not to cut.” Van Huystee and Suleiman therefore steeped themselves in the director’s earlier works, paying particular attention to his use of sound editing. Their challenge was to be true to the director’s spirit while retaining a creative vision of their own that went beyond simply copying his techniques.

The two may now collaborate on a sequel to The Long Season. With Raqqa “liberated” from Isis, it could well now be safe for the refugees to return home, and the filmmakers are planning to follow them.

“We are prepared. If somebody would move next week to Raqqa, we would join them with our camera,” Van Huystee says.

Following its IDFA premiere, the film, which received Film Fund production support, will be released in Dutch cinemas by Mokum Film Distribution. Films Transit is handling the international sales.

Whatever happens to the film, Van Huystee is determined to make sure that the director’s original vision is protected. “The ego had to step aside so that there is always space for Leonard to be there.”

Geoffrey Macnab

IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary

The Long Season Leonard Retel Helmrich

“One of the giants of international documentary, and pioneer of single shot cinema”

Director & script: Leonard Retel Helmrich Production: Pieter van Huystee Film Sales: Films Transit

5

IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary

The Red Soul

Jessica Gorter

Director & script: Jessica Gorter Production: Zeppers Film Sales: Deckert Distribution

6

Monster or messiah?

Jessica Gorter

On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Jessica Gorter’s The Red Soul examines how Soviet leader Joseph Stalin continues to divide the Russian people. Melanie Goodfellow reports.

Millions of Russians perished in labour camps and mass executions under Stalin’s repressive rule, but today’s population remain deeply divided in their opinions on his legacy. Where some see a mass murderer, others see a World War Two hero and father of the nation.

In her third feature-documentary The Red Soul, Jessica Gorter attempts to deconstruct this complex relationship, taking the spectator on a journey across Russia from pro-Stalin commemoration ceremonies in Moscow to forgotten mass graves in the north.

Gorter believes that what happened under Stalin’s rule still plays on the Russian psyche. “In order to understand anything that is going on in Russia today, it’s very important to understand how Russians look at their own history,” she says.

She introduces a range of characters on either side of the divide, from sisters whose mother was interned in a labour camp for most of their child­ hood to a pro-Stalin photographer, who lays red roses on his grave, to civil rights activists on a mission to research evidence of the killing that went on under Stalin’s rule.

When the Berlin Wall came down Gorter’s father called to say she should be in Berlin – but she had other ideas. She had got talking to a young Russian man in a bar in Amsterdam, who invited her to visit him in his home city of Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg. Gorter decided to take him up on the offer.

“Sometimes the ambiguity can even be found in a single individual,” says Gorter. “There are plenty of characters in the film where the family suffered under Stalin, but they still admire and respect him.”

“My dad came to Utrecht Central station to see me off,” she recalls.

“He gave me a compass – he was a child of the Cold War – and said,

Gorter and her crew also stopped off at an elite youth camp to see how Russian history was being taught to youngsters today, partly at the behest of her producer Frank van den Engel at Zeppers Film.

“My main challenge was to make sure the film was contemporary and not only about history. For me it was important that the film looked at the significance of the events under Stalin for people living today,” comments Van den Engel.

The Red Soul is the latest in a body of work by Gorter exploring postSoviet Russian, which she has been visiting since the early days of Perestroika in the late 1980s. Gorter fell in love with Russia through its literature: “My father had travelled to Moscow in the 1960s and it made a huge impression on him… As a teenager. I read all the literature on his bookshelves, from Dostoyevsky to Solzhenitsyn. My fascination for the country grew from there.”

7

“When I got off the train I stepped into Perestroika, what I call this silent revolution” ‘If it goes bad just walk west and I’ll pick you up at the border’…

When I got off the train at the other end, I stepped into Perestroika… or what I call this silent revolution.”

That first trip marked the beginning of a long friendship with her St Petersburg contact Alexei as well as a fascination for post-Soviet Russia. It is a fascination Gorter has explored in most her shorts and films, including last feature 900 Days, revolving around eye-witness accounts of the Siege of Leningrad.

“My next film will be more about my generation and their children and really what is going on,” says Gorter.

“With every film, I arrive more in the present.”

Profile

Ally Derks

8

Close Ally Speaking from Berlin, where she has been spending a year as a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, Ally Derks, founder of IDFA and until very recently its director and guiding light, reflects on how the event that was launched 30 years ago has grown into one of the biggest and most influential documentary festivals in the world.

“First of all, we created this documentary family,” Derks says of the way in which IDFA has been turned into a gathering that everyone in the documentary community, whether filmmakers or distributors or commissioning editors, wants to attend. “I think that is something to be really proud of. Nobody 30 years ago expected it would get this big.”

The inaugural IDFA, which lasted for four days, sold 2000 tickets.

There were 40 international guests and a staff of eight. Now, the event “started by three women,” has turned into a huge machine.

These days it sells over 250,000 tickets, with over 500 volunteers on hand during the event.

“It’s not just a festival any more.

It has become a real documentary institute,” she says, pointing out that the staff members are busy all the year round, not just for 10 days in November. Derks pays tribute to her old colleagues, whose passion and drive has helped transform IDFA into the festival it is today.

One enduring source of pride to Derks is the achievements of the IDFA Bertha Fund (formerly known as the Jan Vrijman Fund), which has kickstarted numerous projects from filmmakers in developing countries, among them such gems as 5 Broken Cameras and Ukrainian Sheriffs.

The Fund has supported over 350 films since its launch in 1998 and has enabled a filmmaking infrastructure to spring up in some countries where there was previously no documentary tradition at all.

As for her own highlights over the last three decades, there are many.

She takes satisfaction in films like Jos De Putter’s Solo Out Of A Dream, Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare or Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Shape Of The Moon, all of which started life in Amsterdam before traveling the world, picking up countless awards as they went. “In a way, IDFA sets the agenda for the rest of the film year,” she says, adding that it’s not just completed films that gain recognition – so do the projects presented in Forum to the international industry.

One of her obsessions was to ensure that filmmakers attended the festival. Without their presence, their documentaries would have been shown in a vacuum – and Derks has always insisted on debate and conversation. The screenings have only ever been the starting point.

Another goal was to include the younger audience – to show documentaries to kids and to get

9

them media savvy. “Don’t take everything for granted. Watch films critically” has always been the message for the many school children and high school students who pack out screenings. (There were 12,000 kids in attendance last year.)

Not every trend in the documentary world is positive. Commissioning editors have far less money at their disposal than a decade ago. Some of the most famous ones (notably Storyville’s Nick Fraser) have retired or moved on to other things.

Those who remain tend to focus more on home grown docs rather than backing projects from further afield. On the other hand, as Derks notes, new players like Netflix, Amazon and HBO have come into the arena.

Many of Derks’ most illustrious old friends from the documentary world will be in town for this year’s festival.

Legends like D.A. Pennebaker and Fred Wiseman will be at IDFA to celebrate the festival’s 30th anniver­ sary, to take part in debates – and to pay tribute to her. (On Nov 18, there will be a marathon interview involving Kim Longinotto, The Yes Men, Hubert Sauper and many others who lit up the festival during Derks’ tenure. Drinks will be served from Ally’s Cocktail Bar.) As for Derks herself, she is looking forward to enjoying the festival as a guest. “I will have the opportunity to talk to a lot of people for longer than one or two minutes!”

Geoffrey Macnab

Snap happy

Willem Baptist

Willem Baptist’s feature debut Instant Dreams investigates the strange and continuing allure of the Polaroid. The company may have filed for bankruptcy in 2008 in the face of the digital revolution but that hasn’t lessened the cult of the instant camera in the slightest.

Rotterdam-based Baptist has been a Polaroid lover himself since his teenage years when he first picked up an old camera in one of the city’s flea markets. “The camera was very worn down. I just thought it looked funny. I didn’t even attempt to make photographs with it,” he remembers.

Eventually, he took the device to a camera shop and found some film to go in it. He figured out on his own how to use it. Baptist’s first pictures were of some sheep grazing in a field. The subject matter may have been banal but the process was magical. The idea that you could press a button and that a picture would pop out was exhilarating.

It made him feel instantly like an artist.

With its mesmeric music and stylised cinematography, Instant

Dreams has the feel of a sci-fi film.

It was shot in cinemascope. Baptist freely admits that he is more influenced 2001: A Space Odyssey and by Close Encounters than he is by traditional documentary.

“For me, this movie is a quest on the grand scale,” Baptist says of the decision to shoot in cinemascope.

“I wanted to do a great epic movie… but, of course, on a very modest budget.”

The film is produced by Pieter van Huystee. Initially, another producer had been attached to the project but decided to retire from the film business. At that point, Baptist was still trying to put the finance together. “I needed a producer fast.”

Broadcaster NTR put him in touch with Van Huystee, who both agreed to come on board and accepted Baptist’s bold and ambitious vision for the film. “I am not interested in capturing reality. I am interested in capturing something deeper.

For me, the story is everything,” the director declares of his approach.

Instant Dreams isn’t intended as a conventional history of the Polaroid camera or even an account of enthusiasts’ attempts to preserve the format in a new digital era.

His real fascination is with “our strange relationship with photographic images, and how we try to capture our dreams”, as well as with his subjects – the artists, scientists and authors who were even more obsessed by Polaroid than he was. They were distinguished figures. Among them

10

was the German artist Stefanie Schneider, who uses her last remaining Polaroid stock to stage a shoot in the California desert, New York Magazine editor Christopher Bonanos and scientist Steve Herchen, who worked for Polaroid for many years and then assisted the “Impossible Project,” the group that stepped into the breach following the closure of Polaroid by buying the last surviving factory “unravelling the secrets” of instant film and trying to keep the Polaroid format alive.

Some of the interviewees were initially sceptical about the young Dutch director and his project.

“Christopher (Bonanos) couldn’t relate to the project at all. I said I was going to make this big scale philosophical movie about the mystery and magic of Polaroid and he was like ‘what are you talking about. There is no magic. It is all bullshit.’”

Schneider, a big-name artist, took some convincing that Baptist could pull it off while Herchen was sympathetic (but also a little bewildered at first) by the director’s approach. “Only on the last day of shooting did he say ‘now I understand what you were trying to make.’”

The subjects have seen the documentary. “That you were going to make this, we couldn’t have imagined!” they all said as they gave the film their instant approval.

Geoffrey Macnab

IDFA First Appearance & Dutch Doc Competitions

Instant Dreams

Willem Baptist

“I wanted to do a great epic movie… but on a very low budget.”

Director & script: Willem Baptist Production: Pieter van Huystee Film Sales: Public Film

11

IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

Deaf Child

Alex de Ronde “There is some­thing of a performer in him.

He just likes to be filmed”

Director & script: Alex de Ronde Production: Pieter van Huystee Film Sales: NPO Sales

12

Prince among the deaf

Alex de Ronde

Alex de Ronde’s thoughtprovoking Deaf Child opens an interesting debate on deaf culture.

Melanie Goodfellow reports.

Alex de Ronde is best known in the Dutch film world as the director of Het Ketelhuis, a popular art-house cinema in the west of Amsterdam.

But behind the scenes in his personal life, he has devoted himself to ensuring his son Tobias, who was born deaf, has the best chances in life. This quest has required crucial choices along the way, such as whether to persevere with the mastering of sign language or experiment with implants that might give Tobias limited hearing.

In his one-off feature, which premieres in the IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary, De Ronde charts Tobias’s journey from struggling to be understood as a child to discovering a community of people just like him at Gallaudet University in the US, the only higher education institution in the world for the deaf and hard of hearing.

“In the beginning, I just made some home movies for fun, although at the same time the idea of making a

documentary about deafness and deaf culture was in the back of my mind as I couldn’t find any documentaries looking at the topic in a convincing way, apart from maybe The Land Of The Deaf,” says De Ronde, referring to French documentarian Nicolas Philibert’s 1992 work. “I wondered whether I should do it myself but then again I wasn’t a filmmaker.”

It was prolific documentary producer Pieter van Huystee, an old high school (later film world) friend, who helped turn the idea into reality. “Pieter and I financed the first shootings ourselves and I made a rough edit using Final Cut Pro,” explains De Ronde. The pair showed the material to broadcaster KRONCRV which boarded immediately, giving them just enough money to hire professional cameramen and an editor for a few days.

“It may sound a bit crazy, but we made this film on the basis of five shooting days and 20 days of editing. We’re proud of these insane figures,” says De Ronde. He notes that Van Huystee also took on the risk of financing the musical score, the sound design and the rest of the post-production upfront.

The project was also helped by the fact that Tobias has a charismatic and engaging presence, both on and off camera. “Although he is far from being narcissistic he was extremely willing to cooperate. There is some­ thing of a performer in him. He just likes to be filmed,” he says.

13

“He is also amazingly professional.

Probably he is the first deaf person ever who dubbed himself.

We found out his sounds in the opening sequence were not that [well] recorded so he dubbed himself afterwards in the studio, making the same gestures and mouth sounds as he did for real.”

The film, supported by the Film Fund, also brings in De Ronde’s older son Joachim, who has a strong bond with his brother having learned to sign too. Another added challenge for all three family members was that his wife passed away at the age of 45, when both boys were still children. It is something they discuss in the film.

“In some ways this film is also a present for their mother in heaven,” says De Ronde.

But beyond this story-telling aspect of the work, De Ronde also wants the film to prompt wider discussion on what it means to be deaf in today’s world and the realm of deaf culture. “Deaf Child shows that a deaf person is fundamentally handicapped in a hearing world, but he is – when you change the circumstances – just a happy member of a cultural minority,” says De Ronde.

“That was the decision Tobias had to make: staying a permanent tourist in his own (hearing) world or becoming a prince in a limited but international kingdom, that of the deaf community.”

After you’re gone…

Piet is Gone Director & script: Jaap van Hoewijk Production: Zeppers Film Co-production: KRO-NCRV

Jaap van Hoewijk

Two films selected for IDFA Dutch Documentary Competition deal acutely with the pain of loss and disappearance. Geoffrey Macnab reports.

Fifty people a day vanish in the Netherlands. Director Jaap van Hoewijk discovered this when he was researching his new documentary Piet is Gone, which he describes as “an anatomy of a disappearance.” Piet Beentjes, the

subject of the film, hasn’t been seen since April 1987, when he was spotted on the island of Texel.

All these years later, his devoted sister Toos is still trying to work out what happened to him.

“She sent me an email. She said my brother has been missing for nearly now 30 years now,” the director remembers. At first, Van Hoewijk thought this was too long ago and that his film should focus on a more recent case. However, he agreed to meet Toos. The moment he did so, he knew she would be the subject of the film.

“It was a personal feeling. My father committed suicide in 1974 which I only discovered in 1997. I’ve been trying to discover what happened for years and years. I immediately

14

recognised my personal feelings in Toos.”

What flabbergasted the director was the off-hand fashion in which the police had treated Piet’s case.

Their general practice is to wait two days after a disappearance before beginning to investigate properly – “understandably, since 50 people a day go missing” – but those two days are the window in which the missing person is most likely to be found. Toos has been badgering the police for three decades but they’ve still never worked the case in anything but the most casual fashion.

“This one detective hardly did anything. He didn’t go and see witnesses who had seen Piet on the ferry or on the island. He never went

IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

Piet is Gone & Garden of Life

Garden of Life Director & script: Marco Niemeijer Production: Marco Niemeijer & seriousFilm

to the island. More shockingly, he never reported the disappearance to the police on the island.”

Toos discovered herself there was a police computer database which kept details (and DNA matches) for missing persons, but that Piet was never added to it. It was at this point that the case became Kafka-esque.

The police had lost the original report into Piet’s vanishing – and so she had to report her brother missing all over again.

“That’s the big tragedy. It’s not a lack of humanity. It is just people who push buttons – and that is wrong. Nobody feels personally responsible. They just do what they have to do and that is it,” the director gives his impression of the attitude of the police.

to coincide with the loss of control over his life,” Niemeijer says of his film, which he made in the same painstaking way that Leo tended his garden. No broadcaster or producer was involved, just the director and the old man whose grasp on his life was ebbing away.

Marco Niemeijer

Marco Niemeijer’s Garden of Life is also about disappearance. In this case, the subject is a man losing control of his life because of Alzheimer’s. He tries to maintain a grasp on his everyday existence by tending his tiny back garden but his world is contracting all the time.

The man is the director’s father-inlaw, Leo. “I was moved by how tenderly Leo treated the plants and flowers and how the role that he had given himself in the garden seemed

15

“There are many films about dementia, a subject that has become quite topical due to ageing populations,” continues Niemeijer.

“In Garden of Life I opt for a different approach by focusing entirely on Leo himself and not on his family or health care. I wanted to know what went on inside him, what the garden meant to him in all this, and what he was trying to show us in his fast changing world.

And I wanted to look beyond our own sadness about his situation.”

Seven Dutch selections

IDFA Competition for Kids & Docs

“IDFA is the perfect match for kids and documentaries”

Lenno & the Angelfish Director: Shamira Raphaëla Production: Tangerine Tree Sales: NPO Sales 16

Kids 4 Docs 4 Kids It is very subtle in many ways and very strong on an emotional level,” Statema underlines.

Meike Statema

“Young audiences are curious and want to explore the world and its stories,” stresses Meike Statema, IDFA’s Head of Education (Youth Programs and IDFAcademy). “They can relate to the main characters and their situations and the issues that they are facing, family or otherwise, whether in the Netherlands or from countries around the globe.

IDFA is the perfect match for kids and documentaries.”

The appropriately named Kids & Docs Competition section offers up 15 films in 2017, seven of which are from The Netherlands. “I always try to make it less from Holland.

It’s just that what we are offered is always really strong in terms of both quality and quantity. I always want the section to be as international as possible, but there are just so many good Dutch films on offer.”

The 2017 selection includes Shamira Raphaela’s Lenno & the Angelfish, about a boy with temper tantrums who nevertheless has a strong and moving relationship with his father. “It is a very cinematic film, and not a clear A to B story.

In a similar vein, Marijn Frank’s A Butcher’s Heart concerns a sensitive animal-loving boy who refuses to succumb to pressure to take over the family butcher business.

“There is a real conflict at the heart of the story that she captures really well,” says Statema. “Dutch kids are authors of their own lives, and no topics are taboo. They are quite independent, and this film is a good example that still shows all the meat cutting and all those disgusting gory things.” (This point is further under­­ lined by the only feature length film in the section, the Norwegian fishing doc Tongue Cutters, about kids employed on trawlers to cut out the tongues of cod.)

“The Dutch films are all quite different. Some are results from the Kids & Docs workshops that we organize,” stresses Statema of her collaboration with Amsterdambased Cinekid, the world’s leading international film festival for young audiences and professionals working within the kids sector. “I know the background and history of each project, and it is always fascinating to see how their authorship emerges and how they transform into really strong cinematic experiences.”

Statema is expecting 12,000 kids to attend screenings at IDFA in 2017.

This includes the IDFA Junior Day at the EYE Filmmuseum on the final Sunday when families are welcome

17

to enjoy a multi-doc extravaganza that includes a quiz and the opportunity to meet the subjects of past documentaries and to hear their subsequent stories. When year-round numbers are collated, including additional initiatives such as IDFA’s Docschool Online, Statema calculates that 40,000 kids will have benefited in 2017 from their new immersion into the world of documentary. At the same time as encouraging children to watch the films, IDFA works hard to promote them with distributors, sales agents and other festivals.

Curiously all of the Dutch films in Kids & Docs Competition are directed by women. (In the regular competition for Dutch documentary five of the fifteen selections are directed by women.) However, Statema is at pains to point out that more male-directed Dutch docs for kids are in the pipeline via the Kids & Docs workshop.

“I am really looking forward to The Man Who Looked Behind the Horizon, which is still in the making,” she notes. The project is being made by Martijn Blekendaal and tells the story of Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader who disappeared in 1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic in a tiny sailing boat. “It is the first time I have heard of a documentary for children that has no children as protagonists,” she claims. “It is a boy’s own and very adventurous style of documentary filmmaking.”

Nick Cunningham

Continued from page 17

Seven Dutch selections

IDFA Competition for Kids & Docs

My Happy Complicated Family Director: Tessa Pope Production: Hazazah Pictures

LISTEN Director: Astrid Bussink Production: Een van de Jongens Sales: NPO Sales

The Monsoonshow Directors: Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden & Annelies Kruk Production: EO/IKONdocs Sales: NPO Sales

18

Kids 4 Docs 4 Kids

Kendis Director: Bibi Fadlalla Production: Hazazah Pictures

A Butcher’s Heart

Andy’s Promise

Director: Marijn Frank Production: Docmakers

Director: Nathalie Crum Production: Een van de Jongens Sales: NPO Sales

19

Photo: Bob Bronshoff

Good lieutenant

Ramon Gieling

“The film is based upon real facts. What you hear is true.

What you see is made with the liberty of creation,” the intertitle reads at the start of Ramon Gieling’s new film Fatum (Room 216), writes Geoffrey Macnab.

In Gieling’s film, selected for Dutch Documentary Competition, the horrific and the sublime collide.

Gieling describes the film as “a hybrid collage.” At its centre is footage of an interrogation of a man by a police officer. The suspect is seemingly friendly and easy going but the questions eventually reveal him as the perpetrator of a series of rapes and murders.

“Usually, when there’s a police interrogation, you hear the shouting… ‘come on you asshole, confess you did it’ etc… [but] this interrogation proceeds in a very polite way.

The police officer has a technique where he doesn’t judge the suspect morally or ethically. He just wants to get the information he needs.”

Gieling had the idea for the film when he was out running in woods near Amsterdam. It was a beautiful, peaceful location but the filmmaker

began to speculate as to what might have happened if there had been a killing or a kidnapping there. Would any trace of the disturbance remain?

Would this become a “guilty place”?

Alongside the police interrogation is the performance of a specially composed piece of music by Paul M van Brugge, featuring violin and cello. Gieling intercuts between the concert, which was performed live in his house, and the questions of the police officer. He also includes text from the Book of Psalms as a reminder of “true love”.

“My film is a philosophical essay, so to speak, about the human subconscious and what it is capable of,” the director declares, distancing himself from the idea that this is a film about a criminal investigation.

ance didn’t capture “the absurd tension” in the original material.

Gieling therefore tried to obtain the rights to use the footage. He tried to contact the police and lawyers but never received a response. Finally, he discovered that the judge at the man’s trial had given permission for the material to be made freely available to the public. “He (the judge) thought it important that people would see this and learn what people are capable of.”

The killer started as a voyeur.

He liked to peep into women’s homes, and Gieling shot scenes as if he too was a voyeur. “It was very awkward to do it,” he says of the scenes he filmed, as if he was lurking in the woods and preying on women himself.

Gieling has long straddled the worlds of documentary and fiction.

His work screens regularly both at documentary festivals like IDFA and events like IFFR. He suggests that his films are never just documentary nor just fiction. Fatum is a conceptual work with “a high emotional impact.” He adds that he doesn’t even consider himself the director of the films. His role is more to “organise the material.” He’ll spend months editing.

The man being interrogated isn’t even a suspect at first but he eventually confesses. His behaviour is bizarre. At the beginning he denies knowing the women and yet he agrees to give blood for DNA testing and offers the boots in which he walked to the house of one of the women. “You see very strange things happening. It’s as if he wants to be caught or to confess what he did.” The interrogator asks him why he did “these crazy things.”

The suspect simply can’t answer.

In the case of Fatum, which he made on a tiny budget, Gieling found the footage of the interrogation online.

At first, he arranged for two actors to play the policeman and the suspect.

That didn’t work as their perfor­m­

The music is “Bartok-like, with constant dissonance.” In the absence of any rational explanation for the killer’s actions, this is Gieling’s way of trying to make sense of acts of such inexplicable evil.

20

IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

Fatum (Room 216)

Ramon Gieling

“A philosophical essay about the human subconscious and what it is capable of” Director & script: Ramon Giegling Production: Thinking out loud productions

21

IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

The Last Fight

Victor Vroegindeweij

Director: Victor Vroegindeweij Script: Sarah Vos Production: Witfilm

22

Against the ropes Victor Vroegindeweij

Filmmaker Victor Vroegindeweij is in Dutch Competition at IDFA 2017 with The Last Fight, a dramatic portrait of Dutch mixed martial arts (MMA) star Marloes Coenen. The director talks to Nick Cunningham.

For director Vroegindeweij, there is an absurd paradox at the heart of his latest film. Marloes Coenen was, for many years, the queen of international kick boxing and cage fighting. What’s more, the Dutch have bossed the intensely violent K1 fighting code for the past 15 years.

“But The Netherlands is a country that is built on consensus and that grey area in the middle,” the director opines. “In Holland we always debate and then we find a way where everybody loses a little bit, in politics and business, and we are quite successful at it. That we are the best at this extremely violent sport is strange. In MMA there is no middle ground. No consensus.

Winner takes all.”

As a subject, Coenen has it all.

She is clever, highly articulate and beautiful. She knows that her powers are waning and also that

her biological clock is ticking – she wants to have a child with her gentle boyfriend Roemer, also a fighter.

She is therefore contemplating her last fight. She wants to retire as world champion.

“This is basically what I am looking for as a filmmaker – everything is there,” agrees Vroegindeweij. “A great person and a great subject to engage with the viewer. And her story is amazing.

When I first met her I saw that sense of obsession and panic in her eyes, and then I thought ok, this is a film.”

Of course there is conflict at the heart of the story, and not just within the mind of Coenen. The training set-up has a three-way orientation. Head trainer Martijn is tough and no-nonsense. Boyfriend Roemer is kind and supportive and a little too compliant. Meanwhile her mind-coach Leon consults tarot cards to help determine her prefight preparation strategies.

Even though the antagonists don’t articulate their differences, the strain is continually evident, especially after Coenen loses one elimination contest and another is cancelled due to an opponent’s inability to make the fight weight.

Eventually Coenen must decide which path to take.

The strain was also felt by the director. “We filmed for three years. We wanted to film the last fight and that didn’t happen, it was just waiting and waiting – then,

23

shit she lost, and now it was another five months until the next fight...”

A very satisfying dimension of the film is the gnarled, hard-bitten commentary delivered in English by veteran US actor Bruce Dern which helps to elevate Coenen’s existential dilemma into the realm of the universal. “I wanted to add a layer of philosophical depth that can hang above the story and can comment from a place of experience.

This film talks to many cultures.

“When I first met her I saw that sense of obsession and panic in her eyes” The voice-over emphasises that and makes it more accessible to an Anglo-Saxon audience as well.”

Dern was immediately interested in the film and the voice-over gig, but Vroegindeweij had no money left in the budget to pay for the 90 minutes recording time the actor was prepared to give. The director ended up paying out of his own pocket.

“Fighters feel that their last fight is their only fight,” Vroegindeweij adds. “You can win throughout your entire career but if you lose the last one, you feel like a loser forever.

Which is not what life is about.

Life is not about the last fight, life is about everything you do in its entirety.”

IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

Alicia

Maasja Ooms

“I was immediately fascinated by Alicia’s strength and will” Director & script: Maasja Ooms Production: Cerutti Film

24

Suffer the child Maasja Ooms

Filmmaker Maasja Ooms explains to Melanie Goodfellow why her new film Alicia, about a young girl in long-term care, has personal resonance.

Maasja Ooms makes her IDFA debut this year with feature documentary Alicia, an up-close portrait of a young girl who has spent much of her life in care. Ooms reveals that one of the main motivations for making the film was that she too spent her early years in care in a children’s home in Amsterdam, from birth to the age of four.

She recalls how the cries of a threeyear-old girl when she first visited the children’s home where Alicia lives, for research purposes, had an unexpected impact on her. “I was surprised to find myself so affected by her crying,” she recalls. “But then I understood first-hand that when the cry of a child for its mother remains unsatisfied, it becomes a cry of despair.”

“When the absence lasts too long, because a child can’t live at home, they will start blaming themselves, thinking ‘I am not nice’, or ‘Nobody likes me’.

I understood how these themes could resonate throughout life.”

Luckily for Ooms, the director of the children’s home was receptive to her idea of shooting a film there, although she went through a lengthy vetting process before finally being allowed to speak directly to care-workers at the home.

“I was immediately fascinated by Alicia’s strength and strong will.

She was a survivor, with a need to take control of a situation,” explains Ooms. “With someone like her, it’s exciting to search through the camera for the unsaid – that sadness and pain because of the miserable situation she’s in, not having a place to call home.”

The filmmaker would spend more than three years following Alicia, taking time to get the children used to her presence and that of the camera before filming.

Ooms has taken an observational approach, allowing the tale of Alicia’s fate to unfold at its own pace to powerful effect. “In my previous film [Tussen Mensen], viewers are witnessing two people undergoing marriage counselling.

Filmed in wide shots, it is easy to watch the non-verbal story that’s being told,” she explains.

“Although Alicia is filmed close cropped, using a handheld camera, both films are purely observational and take the time to tell a story, following the ‘show, don’t tell’ principle.”

25

Life in the home could sometimes be chaotic and Ooms admits there were moments she felt compelled to intervene. “It happened intuitively.

Once, Alicia pushed a little boy off the trampoline while I was filming. There was no-one around.

No supervisor. I took no time to think and I just acted,” she recalls.

“There have also been instances where I didn’t intervene, because I needed to tell the story. I could refrain, because I knew I was working on a bigger story, trying to understand Alicia.”

The documentary marks a first collaboration between Ooms, who is also a respected cinematographer with some 40 credits to her name, and producer Willemijn Cerutti at Cerutti Film. The pair were both branching out independently as the production took off and this new venture drew them together.

“I consider myself a creative pro­ ducer,” explains Cerutti. “In some projects, I am more creatively involved than others. Maasja is a very autonomous person, and she did the directing, the camera, most of the sound, and the edit.”

“My added value was organising the funding and the impact side, which is an important side of this project,” Ooms adds, revealing that the IDFA premiere will tie in with the launch of hard-hitting outreach campaigns aimed at highlighting the trauma of children in long-term care.

Three’s company Independent Boy Director & script: Vincent Boy Kars

Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen

Amsterdam-based HALAL is in the doc ascendant with three films in IDFA selection. The company’s head of documentary Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen talks to Nick Cunningham.

Many producers of documentary tell you that they want to take visual storytelling to the next level. But when HALAL’s Olivia Sophie van Leeuwen talks about upping the doc ante, she’s not just talking top-level content and emotional impact.

She is making a case for cinematic aesthetics of the highest order.

“People compliment us, saying that our documentary is so good it looks like fiction film, and actually I get really upset by this,” she says.

“Because I believe that is something we can all achieve if wanted. We all

26

have the same equipment and the same technical talent to work with, and should all be able to make stunning images. Basically at HALAL we try to design images where you can stop the film anywhere and print out a beautiful still.”

A Stranger Came to Town is the feature debut of award-winning Amsterdam-based filmmaker Thomas Vroege. In the film, the director returns to Aleppo to follow four inhabitants, each of whom had previously used home footage to chronicle their dramatic and highly

Company profile

HALAL docs personal story. Vroege won a European Film Award in 2015 for his short documentary 9 Days – From my Window in Aleppo.

“People ask me if there are not too many films about Syria and I answer that there are never enough films about Syria,” Van Leeuwen stresses.

“But I do believe this film is different because it has force and momentum. It is not a geopolitical film but a film about human beings and the need to tell stories, and the way that influences their lives.”

The feature doc Independent Boy by Vincent Boy Kars explores, via his deconstruction of the documentary form, the nature and essence of success, what it means and how it shapes our thinking. “The film is about what makes people think a successful life implies, and during its making Vincent recognises that his perspective on success is not the only one, and may not even be the right one. He has great dogmas that he stands for that I believe make the film unique in its own film world.”

Kars won a NL Film Fund Wildcard in 2015.

HALAL’s short doc Love Letters, funded by the Teledoc Campus scheme, is about that most anachro­ nistic of communi­cation methods, the love letter. But director Tara Fallaux’s letter writers aren’t grannies, nor are they folk contemplating their imminent retirement. Her subjects are millen­nials who eschew the transitory and emoji-laden blandness of Snapchat in favour of elegance and permanence. “It is a

Stranger Came to Town Director & script: Thomas Vroege Love Letters Director: Tara Fallaux

return to the romantic age,” under­ lines Van Leeuwen. “When you receive a hand-written love letter, it is from someone who is throwing all their emotions and feelings onto the table. This it is a very positive, beautiful, sweet piece.”

Van Leeuwen counters the assumption that HALAL is a mere breeding ground for young and emerging talent. They have established talents on their books too, such as Sjoerd Oostrik (A Quiet Place) and Willemiek Kluijfhout

27

whose Sex and Oysters is currently in development. “But of course we do have young talents attached, and we want to grow older with them.”

“What is more important is that I see it as a test for our filmmakers to tell positive stories that celebrate lives and individuals. The topic can be heavy, such as with A Stranger Came to Town, but overall the message must be still positive in the end. This is an underlying principle of the company. We feel it as an intuition.”

Behind the mask Simonka de Jong

Simonka de Jong’s The Pilot’s Mask, selected for IDFA Dutch Competition, is bound to provoke an emotional response in viewers.

The documentary is about seriously ill young children in the Princess Maxima hospital in Utrecht, writes Geoffrey Macnab.

In the film De Jong takes the kids’ perspective. The parents, doctors and nurses are seen only on the edge of the frame. “That was new for me – to leave out a lot of what was happening in the room and [concentrate on] the children,” says the director. “I also leave interviews and voice-overs out so that, as a viewer, you only focus on the faces of the children and how they experience being in the hospital.”

The director filmed over a period of a year. She had done her preliminary research in the AMC Hospital in Amsterdam but wasn’t allowed to shoot there. Hospital authorities were nervous about their patients’ privacy and had bad memories of a controversial TV programme shot with hidden cameras. De Jong had to fight to win their trust. “We talked to many hospitals and finally we found the Princess Maxima Centre,

which is the national children’s cancer centre,” the director says.

“They’re a relatively new hospital.

The director there was very enthusiastic about the idea for the film because he said they really focus on children and how children experience the hospital. It fit in with their ideas.”

Financiers were wary about the project. They weren’t sure whether De Jong would be able to pull off an entire feature documentary focussed entirely on the child patients.

“I had a very strong feeling this was a film I really wanted to make,” De Jong says of her determination to continue with The Pilot’s Mask whatever the reservations of some potential backers. “I was so touched by the children. They are so in the moment and don’t have the capacity to think about the future. They don’t think about death yet or how this (their treatment) will end. I had the feeling we could really learn something from these children. One moment, they are sad or scared but the next they are already happy again and playing.”

These kids, she adds, had an “immense capacity” for coping.

Most were 3 or 4 years old. Her way of gaining their confidence was just to start playing with them. The children very quickly forgot the cameras were there and behaved in a natural and spontaneous way.

“Winning the confidence of the parents was not always easy,” the

28

director remembers. “Of course, it is one of the most terrible things that happens as a parent that your child is so ill you are not sure they will survive.”

A PR manager was always on hand to check the filmmakers didn’t cross any boundaries. “They (the hospital authorities) very soon realised that we were very serious; that we really took a lot of time and that we were very careful with the children and the parents but also with the doctors.”

De Jong and her team were trusted to the extent that they were allowed into the operating theatres.

Everyone knew they weren’t exploiting the kids. The director “loved” all of the children but had a “special bond” with the little boy Owen, the only one who died.

“I followed him for the longest period of time. I saw a very, very lively kid who was playing, running and being stubborn at the beginning. I saw how his situation became worse and worse.”

The film has now been screened to the parents. It was an emotional event but one at which the mums and dads bonded closely after realising they had shared many of the same experiences. As for the kids themselves, one or two of the older ones may turn up for the IDFA premiere. “A lot of the other parents think their children are still too young to see it. It is an intense film and Owen’s story is very sad.”

IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

The Pilot’s Mask

Simonka de Jong

“I had the feeling we could really learn something from these children” Director: Simonka de Jong Script: Wiro Felix Production: De Haaien Co-production: EO Sales: NPO Sales

29

Mumbai massacre Carina Molier

Director Carina Molier tells Melanie Goodfellow how Back To The Taj Mahal grew out of a desire to explore the impact of fear both on individuals and the world in general.

Filmmaker Carina Molier lived briefly as a child in Mumbai’s luxury Taj Mahal Palace Hotel when her father was posted to India in the 1960s as an expatriate worker within the petrochemical industry. “It was just the first weeks while my parents looked for an apartment, but I have a lot of memories,” Molier says.

These came flooding back as she watched the terror attack on the hotel and other locations across Mumbai unfold on her television screen back in the Netherlands as an adult on November 26, 2008.

“As I watched the news, I could see all the places where I had once lived and played,” she recalls.

Beyond stirring up these images, the attacks also reminded Molier of how her mother had always been fearful while they were living in the luxury establishment. “This idea of fear has been in my life since an early age and I’ve always been

interested in how fear drives people,” Molier says. “I started to read philosophers on the topic.

I thought it would be interesting to make a film, reflecting on what fear means and how it is affecting our world.”

The idea of tying this exploration in with the Mumbai attacks was cemented after she met a CEO at a conference, who had had staff staying at the hotel the night it was stormed.

A total of 164 people died in the attacks and hundreds more were injured but Molier’s documentary Back To The Taj Mahal – which plays in both the Mid-Length and Dutch Documentary competitions at IDFA – does not dwell on the physical details of the events.

Rather, it focuses on the personal accounts of five survivors: a German woman whose partner died from his injuries when he tried to escape through the window of their upper floor room; a British copywriter, whose life changed radically forever that night; a local journalist, caught up in the carnage while attending a wedding with his elderly mother; a security advisor, and an Australian cameraman. Molier is hoping some of them will attend the IDFA premiere where they will meet for the first time.

Each talks about how they dealt with their fear. The German survivor recalls how she kept falling asleep while her partner got increasingly

30

agitated. The UK producer describes how he and his girlfriend hatched a plan to disarm any gunman who entered their room, while the Australian recalls thinking death would be a welcome relief to the terror he felt as he listened to the sound of shots approaching room by room along his floor.

“I think people agreed to participate because they understood I wanted to make more than a journalistic item about the attack,” says Molier.

“The idea was always to make a film with extra layers, reflective layers.”

Molier intercuts these on-camera interviews with current-day images of the Taj Mahal, restored once again to an oasis of calm, as well as terrifying real-life footage of the gunmen marauding through the hotel’s corridors. The filmmaker explains she wanted to strike a balance between capturing the terror of the moment and an exploration of fear.

“I didn’t want to make people more fearful than they were by watching the film,” she explains. “I want them to get into a meditative mood, to think about fear. I think when viewers see how the people develop in the film, they’ll get a sense that while their experiences that night didn’t exactly free them, they transformed and liberated their thinking.”

Back To The Taj Mahal is produced

by Witfilm and received a Film Fund post-production grant.

IDFA Mid-Length & Dutch Doc Competitions

Back To The Taj Mahal

Carina Molier

“I wanted to reflect on what fear means and how it is affecting our world”

Director & script: Carina Molier Production: Witfilm Sales: CAT&Docs

31

IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

My Name is Nobody

Director: Denise Janzee Script: Tamara Vuurmans Production: Talent United BV

32

Denise Janzee

The boy in the middle Denise Janzee

In her documentary My Name is Nobody, selected for Dutch Competition at IDFA 2017, Denise Janzee sets out to unravel a mystery surrounding two of Italian cinema’s most legendary figures. She reveals all to Nick Cunningham.

It is a picture that all cineastes and students of Italian cinema know well. Three adolescent boys are posing for a very formal school photograph sometime in the 1930s.

The one on the left, tough and confident, is Sergio Leone.

The one on the right, a little jugeared but possessing of a sensitive face, is Ennio Morricone. But who is the boy in the middle? As one character in the film puts it, “the one with the kind eyes, quiet and serene”.

This was the question that struck director Denise Janzee when she saw the picture on a programme that was broadcast on Dutch television more than a decade ago.

But why should such an innocent tableau pique her curiosity and unleash her creative powers?

“Later I realised it is also my own story. I was raised by two famous

people, and I was always fitting in between them.” she says.

support (development and production) amounted to €128,000.

Janzee is the daughter of acclaimed Dutch actress Willeke van Ammelrooy, star of Dutch classics Mira, The Lift and Antonia’s Line, whose second husband is the acclaimed opera singer Marco Bakker. “It is not so important, but it struck me afterwards as the reason why I wanted to make the film. It is nice to make a film about someone that nobody knows, somebody in the shadow of fame.”

With the director’s input, screen­ writer Tamara Vuurmans provided a bravura script that culminates in a moving and sensitive oration that gathers the threads of Janzee’s complex narrative, delivered by Colombini against an idealised Roman backdrop.

The film, shot over two weeks in Rome, attempts to find out just who the boy in the middle is, in the process uncovering a past that is infused with tragedy and silences.

The film is also a treatise on fame and ageing, as a cast of interviewees ranging from a painter/restorer, a doctor, a lawyer, a barber, a priest and a former actor/director, as well as numerous passers-by, speculate as to who the mystery boy may have become.

Dutch broadcasters were reluctant to invest in the project because of its lack of Dutch content. But former documentary consultant at the Netherlands Film Fund, Pieter Fleury, understood where Janzee was coming from and suggested that the director should enlist the help of his friend Willy Colombini, a flamboyant thespian contemporary of Leone/Morricone, to help tell the story. “As soon as I met Willy I knew I had a film,” Janzee confirms. Total Fund

33

One late scene involves Morricone himself responding to questions about his mystery school chum after Janzee photobombs a television shoot for which he is answering questions on his musical works.

In the scene, the reluctant and

“It is nice to make a film about somebody that nobody knows, somebody in the shadow of fame” dismissive composer has no idea as to why he is being asked questions about this mystery person whom he last encountered eighty years ago. “[Morricone] is a man who talks about his music, and was a little bit angry. He was the maestro and only wanted to talk about his music.

And that is just what I wanted to show. This was enough for me.

It was good to see that it is not always so nice to be famous, when you can’t have normal contact with ordinary people.”

IDFA Masters & Panorama

“Duoling is creating a world for his own spirituality. This gives me a hint of how to visualize his way of being.” Frank Scheffer Directors: Frank Scheffer & Jia Zhao Script: Frank Scheffer Production: Interakt Productions Co-production: Muyi Film 34

Dutch masters Top Dutch talent features prominently in the IDFA 2017 Masters and Panorama sections.

Nick Cunningham reports.

In The Crow is Beautiful directors Frank Scheffer and Jia Zhao (also producer of Lady of the Harbour, see page 38) take a visual journey through the work of the Chinese artist He Duoling. Approaching the artworks without preconceptions, they take an open-minded view of the artist’s creative process, as he draws inspiration from Western classical music, the “mournfulness” of Russian literature and the simplicity of Japanese architecture.

“I realized during my research with He Duoling that his pursuit for inner ‘renewal’ is not a linear process,” explains Scheffer. “Like many things in Eastern philosophy, he re-visits the old techniques used in earlier times and combines it with new thoughts to create something new, for example making a relief of his old oil paint work. I also feel that his creation is based on what nature brings him and what he encounters, instead of running after something in particular. This interests me and inspires me.”

The 55-minute film, produced by Rene and Mira Mendel for Dutch production company Interakt and co-produced by Zhao’s Muyi Film, is selected for Masters. “Like a qin player, Duoling is creating a world for his own spirituality above all.

This gives me a hint of how to

visualize his way of being… to come closer to the essence of his world.”

Dutch wunderkind Morgan Knibbe, whose feature debut Those Who Feel the Fire Burning set IDFA alight in 2014, takes the DoP credit on Danish director Mikala Krogh’s A Year of Hope, also in Masters.

The film, co-produced by Submarine and supported by the FilmFund, is a coming-of-age story about a group of Manila street boys who get a chance to change their lives.

Krogh invited Knibbe to join her after she saw Those Who Feel…

“I thought their idea was very interesting and saw it as an amazing opportunity to work with experienced filmmakers, to gain experience as a DoP and to travel to a place in the world I had never visited before, The Philippines,” explains Knibbe.

Knibbe points out that, from a technical perspective, the approach and workflow were very different on his and Krogh’s films. “Mikala was looking for a style that would allow us to capture reality in a more improvising manner, allowing for the crew to be surprised by the unpredictable… to capture the emotional and psychological development of the boys during one year of rehabilitation… [as] they had to come to terms with their violent, traumatic past. Those Who Feel the Fire Burning was a mosaic about many different refugees stuck at the borders of Europe, told from the perspective of the ghost of a drowned refugee, portraying the

35

fringes of Europe as a purgatory for immigrants. Thus, both films required a very different audiovisual approach.” Dutch sound designer Taco Drijfhout was also invited to work on Krogh’s film. Drijfhout did sound for Stranger in Paradise (last years opening film at IDFA) and Radio Kobanî by Reber Dosky, which won best Dutch documentary at IDFA 2016.

In IDFA Panorama selection is Greenaway’s Alphabet, Saskia Boddeke’s portrait of avant-garde filmmaker Peter Greenaway and his fascinations, arranged alpha­ betically, starting with A (for Amsterdam). A multimedia artist and director for film and stage, Boddeke is partner to, and artistic collaborator with, Greenaway.

The film also features the couple’s highly perceptive teenage daughter Zoe who provides spontaneous, poignant and heart-breaking observations on her father.

“My aim was to get them in front of the camera as naturally as possible,” explains Boddeke. “He is an easy talker, words stream out of his mouth, but he is very distant…

My daughter was a great push in helping him to show his more private side and his eagerness to always create. I know them both very well, and my biggest aim was to show that Peter is a constant creator. Even in the wrinkles of a puddle he finds a new concept.

The film shows a loving relation­ ship between Peter and his daughter.”

Digital rituals Sander Veenhof

Photo: Corinne de Korver

Patent Alert

Caspar Sonnen

IDFA’s new media strand DocLab and the Netherlands Film Fund have joined forces on the new Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant, writes Melanie Goodfellow.

Unfolding under the banner of “Uncharted Rituals”, the 11th edition of IDFA’s cutting-edge new media showcase DocLab will explore the new human rituals evolving around the use of techno­ logy in the digital age.

“The questions are shifting from what technology does to us to what we do with technology,” says DocLab creator and curator Caspar Sonnen.

Since its launch in 2007, DocLab has grown into one of the key events on the international film festival circuit looking at the intersection between technology and art, alongside showcases such as Tribeca Storyscapes and Sundance’s New Frontier.

“Last year was our 10th edition and it was a year of looking back. This is a year of looking forward as well as at where we are now,” says Sonnen.

“On the one hand digital story­ telling is establishing itself as an art form that continuously redefines what existing media can be, as well as new developments like immersive media, AI and the Internet of Things. At the same time, there’s also a sense that the internet is less of an open and level playing field as it becomes more and more controlled by a few companies.”

Dorien van de Pas, head of the Fund’s New Screen NL department says IDFA’s work dovetails with New Screen’s focus on new talent, art films and short films as well as interactive and innovative ways of storytelling.

Against this backdrop the Netherlands Film Fund in addition to backing the programme introduced a new €20.000 Film Fund Doc Lab Grant, aimed at two Dutch interactive projects that will be showcased at this year’s edition.

“We want to help Dutch talent to stand out with their projects and to bring them to a higher and more international level. For us the artistic quality, combined with a collective experience in an (inter) national context, are important criteria for this grant.”

36

“We have been following the work of DocLab and Caspar for a while and it was clear that the quality of the projects is very high,” she says.

Film Fund DocLab Interactive The Last Chair

The winners of the debut round are W/O/R/K, by Dutch collective The Smartphone Orchestra and a multimedia performance of the documentary podcast Bob, by Nele Eeckhout, Siona Houthuys and Mirke Kist at audio collective Schik.

For W/O/R/K, The Smartphone Orchestra is teaming with the UK’s immersive art collective Anagram to create a narrative experience, that will premiere at DocLab’s opening night.

The team behind Bob is planning a live audience event inspired by its six-part podcast series – about the fantastical love life of forty-something Elisha – transforming the audio story into a more visual experience.

“Audio artists have been exploring collective listening events for a few years, but we really liked how Schik wanted to take this a step further into an interactive multimedia experience,” says Sonnen.

There are a number of other Dutch projects in other sections of DocLab: Tessa Pope and Niels van Koevorden’s Echoes of IS, a web documentary about people affected directly by the Islamic State produced by Submarine Channel; Jessie van Vreden and Anke Teunissen’s The Last Chair, a 360-work about five elderly people and their favourite chair, and Micha Wertheim’s Somewhere Else will premiere in the Uncharted Ritual sidebar.

37

Jessie van Vreden and Anke Teunissen

Antoinette de Jong and Robert Knoth’s Poppy Interactive will compete in the IDFA DocLab Competition For Digital Storytelling.

Another three Dutch works feature in the Competition For Immersive Non-fiction: the US-Dutch dance and music VR experience Dance Tonite, Sander Veenhof’s Patent Alert, exploring how augmented reality headsets will impact our behaviour in the future, and the podcast series Bob. “Dutch new media work is definitely on the rise, in VR as well as in the experimental space.

There’s some amazing work going on,” says Sonnen.

Safe haven a flamboyant Chinese business woman who had extensive contacts in Bulgaria, among them mob connections. She wasn’t exactly Oskar Schindler but she has played a heroic role in helping the Syrian immigrants.

Jia Zhao

Jia Zhao, Chinese-Dutch producer and founder of Muyi Film, first had the idea for Lady of the Harbour at IDFA 2015, when she met the father of young Beijing-based Sean Wang, then studying script­writing at the Beijing Film Academy, writes Geoffrey Macnab.

The father was working in Athens and told Zhao colourful stories about Chinese immigrants who had come to Europe in the 1990s following exactly the same route as Syrian refugees today.

Some travelled legally but others were smuggling themselves across borders.

“That triggered me. I didn’t know any of this history at all,” the producer says. She began to think this could be an intriguing subject for a film. Son Sean, who had won plaudits for his student film The Huis Away From Home (2014), about a Muslim’s immigration across China, agreed to direct. The original title was ‘Arks of Confucius’.

The filmmakers needed a main character and eventually found one in the shape of Suzanne,

Suzanne, who is in her early 50s, turned out to be quite a draw when it came to getting the film financed.

“First of all, she is very photogenic,” Zhao says of her subject, who charmed the commissioning editors. Suzanne is also a formidably strong-willed figure who has displayed enormous courage in helping the refugees. Suzanne may make mistakes but she is pragmatic and business-minded. She uses oldfashioned Chinese acumen to come to the aid of the Syrians. “The film really has a lot of humour in it. It is not like this very sad, heavy, tragic refugee (story),” Zhao says.

Suzanne’s motives for helping the refugees are complex. She feels guilt over the death of her father, for which she may have been responsible.

This wasn’t an easy film to finance, even with Suzanne on board. Zhao couldn’t go to the normal European funders as the production had very few European elements, but trade body the China Greece Trade Association invested in the documentary because its members felt it had an important story to tell which reflected the Chinese experience in Greece. Zhao also secured backing from Canada and

38

from the Busan Film Festival.

The post-production was completed in the Netherlands.

Lady of the Harbour (handled inter­ nationally by sales agent CAT&Docs) was made all over the world, in China, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece. Director Wang was relatively inexperienced but was a committed cinephile with a strong vision.

There wasn’t enough money for a cameraman and so Wang ended up shooting the film himself. “There was pretty much a synergy between us. I wouldn’t say that I was leading him…but it was a very good result in the end,” the producer says of the collaboration.

As she finishes Lady of the Harbour, Zhao already has various other projects percolating. In all her work, she looks to bring western European and eastern filmmakers and stories together. One of her current documentaries, Kabul At This Moment, looks at contemporary life in Afghanistan. Another, The Crow Is Beautiful, which she co-directed with Frank Scheffer and also premiering at IDFA, is about the painter He Duoling, whose creative processes and output express his ways of thinking as a Chinese man (see page 34).

Zhao may have founded her company in 2012 but since then she has become a regular fixture at IDFA where many of her films looking at intercultural exchange between China and the west have been selected.

IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary

Lady of the Harbour

Sean Wang

“Suzanne is a formidably strong-willed figure who has displayed enormous courage in helping the refugees” Director & script: Sean Wang Production: MUYI FILM Sales: CAT&Docs

39

Director profile Jessica Gorter

After the outbreak of Perestroika in Russia, Jessica travelled to St. Petersburg and was seized by the silent revolution taking place there. This resulted in her first feature length doc Piter which premiered at IFFR in 2014.

900 Days (2012) her second feature length documentary, is about the siege of Leningrad

during World War II, presenting an emotional picture of the struggle of survivors whose personal memories were overshadowed by the heroic myth held up by the authorities.

That film sparked the idea for The Red Soul, which is selected for IDFA 2017 Competition, after she witnessed the differences of opinion on Stalin within her group of elderly interviewees.

“New subjects just keep coming, because the whole history is evolving in front of your eyes,” Gorter says.

Photo: Jochem Jurgens

Jessica Gorter studied documentary film­ making and editing at the Dutch Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam. Since then she has worked as an independent filmmaker focusing on post-soviet Russia.