IDFA Journal 4

Journal November 21/22

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New Docs, New Direction In his first year at the helm of IDFA, artistic director Orwa Nyrabia is following a predictably frantic schedule. Interviewed during a short break at lunchtime in the NH Carlton just before he was due to take festival guests on a tour of IDFA venues, Nyrabia spoke of the time challenges he has been facing.

“We had a minimum of four events happening at the same time throughout the day on Sunday – and, of course, at the same time, all of the films.” Thankfully, there were a record number of sold-out screenings. With four days still to go, it looks as if festival attendances will be up.

On Friday evening, Nyrabia himself conducted the Q&A at the end of the world premiere of Hans Pool’s Bellingcat – Truth in a Post-Truth World. Nyrabia, it turns out, has done some work for Bellingcat, the ‘citizen investigative journalist’ collective, communicating directly with Elliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, about what had been happening in Syria. “That was in another life, when I found myself working on human rights violations documentation”, he remembers.

Expanding spectrum

Asked what he sees as highlights from this year’s IDFA so far, he immediately points to the “amazing presence of Asian filmmakers.” Established filmmakers like Zhang Yang, Wang Bing and Xiaoshuai Wang have either been or are coming to Amsterdam this week. New talents have also been present, among them Mingying Zhou, director of The Land of Peach Blossoms. There are four Indian films too, including “the master” Anand Patwardhan with his new feature Reason.

“All were received beautifully by the audience. To me, this is a great accomplishment – to reach out and expand our spectrum”, Nyrabia reflects on the Asian influx. Chinese directors with glittering records in fiction are increasingly turning to documentary. “This is a very interesting development in Chinese cinema, which also tells us again that the great moment for documentary film is not only connected to Netflix and the current Western mode of consumption and viewing…when it is happening in China with filmmakers of this calibre, we can be very sure that documentary is entering a new era.”

Mediator and moderator

Murmurings have been heard among industry folk at Arti et Amicitiae this week that fewer Scandinavian films are in official selection than normal. Nyrabia suggests this is an “optical illusion” and says he “has always been a fan of Scandinavian documentary” and that there are Scandi titles, both in the main programme and in the Forum. One year it is more films, the other a bit less, but this is just normal.

The artistic director intends IDFA to be a platform for “everybody around the documentary field.” The festival can act as mediator and moderator. For example, Nyrabia and his team worked hard to ensure that the Forum had both broadcasters and SVOD platforms participating. “I am very proud that we had Netflix, in the person of Kate Townsend, sitting at the table at the Forum. This pluralism of financing is an important part of our policy.”

Rituals

Nyrabia has revealed that the Forum will undergo sharp but as yet unspecified changes in the next two years. “It is high time all the stakeholders re-think the processes and rituals of how we do business,” Nyrabia says, pointing to what he calls a “serious problem” in the way that all pitching forums are structured. “I see a lot of frustration over the format of the central pitches… the industry is changing so fast. We cannot stay the same.”

IDFA, he points out, was the first to introduce the concept of a forum in documentary film. That is why he regards it as so important that the festival “challenges its own accomplishments” and doesn’t “rest on its laurels… I hope already in 2019, we will introduce some ‘testers’, experimental changes.”

Enhanced status

In the festival generally, Nyrabia is determined that filmmakers from “less represented regions” will have a louder voice and an enhanced status. “This is a discussion that has been delayed too much… it is essential,” he says. “Those who have experienced long disrespect within the industry, will get a better place at IDFA”, Nyrabia promises.

Commenting on the trend for Westerners to make documentaries in Africa and the Middle East (and the ongoing debate about cultural colonialism), he points out that resources for filmmakers are limited. “It is not an endless marketplace. If one British filmmaker goes to Sierra Leone and films the story of Ebola that (local director) Arthur Pratt and his team filmed [in Survivors], when Arthur Pratt wants to make a film, the industry will say that they’ve made a film about that already.”

Antidote

Nyrabia believes that “lobbying, campaigning and propaganda… even for good causes, is not good cinema.” He always looks for documentaries addressing social problems to do so with vision and sincerity. “Artistic authenticity and artistic freedom are our antidote to lies and manipulation,” he states.

The festival director has committed IDFA fully to the 50/50 Pledge for gender equality. He is under no illusion, though, that “unconscious bias” will disappear overnight. At least, the subject is now being addressed with the respect and seriousness it deserves. “This is the first step – that nobody can ridicule this aim anymore.”

Inspiration

The festival director is building from solid foundations.

IDFA remains the biggest and probably the best respected doc event in the world, and has stable financing. “We need to grow, that is the challenge…”

One source of continuing inspiration is the swarm of enthusiastic kids who attend IDFA screenings and events, including DocLab’s interactive documentaries.

“It is one of the dearest and most precious aspects of IDFA’s work for me, this great effort in programming and showing documentaries to children… it’s the best feeling during IDFA when you look in the street and you see a whole queue of classes, lining up to go into film. It is just wonderful!” •

By Geoffrey Macnab

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Outbreak of Cinephilia Tel Aviv-based sales outfit Cinephil is to handle sales on Serebrennikov, a new doc about the embattled Russian filmmaker, theatre director and anti-Putin activist, Kirill Serebrennikov, now on trial in Russia. Simone Bauman is understood to be producing the project. By Geoffrey Macnab The Serebrennikov case is becoming a cause celebre. He is a world-renowned filmmaker whose work has screened at many major festivals (Leto was in competition in Cannes) and yet has fallen foul of the Putin regime – and faced arrest and harassment.

Another high-profile title recently added to the company’s slate is Carl Javér’s feature documentary, Reconstructing Utøya, in which survivors from the Utøya terrorist attack in Norway on 2011 talk through the experiences in a black box studio together with twelve young participants, and recreate scenes from the massacre. The film has been receiving rave reviews in Sweden and Norway since its premiere in Bergen.

All territories are available excluding the Nordic countries.

Here at IDFA, Cinephil has also taken on sales duties on Bellingcat – Truth in a Post-Truth World (a world premiere last weekend in IDFA’s Frontlight). The film looks at the work of Elliot Higgins, the British blogger and activist, and the

investigative journalism he and others have been carrying out from behind their computers, into everything from the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 to the Skripal poisoning case. “It’s timely in form and in content. I am sure a lot of young people around the world are going so relate to this. It’s magical – if you can make a documentary that is going to interest a 20-year-old and a 65-year-old, it’s a winwin,” Cinephil Managing Director Philippa Kowarsky commented of the pick-up, which was made just before IDFA. CAA is handling North American rights, but Cinephil will be representing the film throughout the rest of the world.

Cinephil has also been presenting Reason, the harrowing Indian documentary directed and produced by Anand Patwardhan. This explores the seething political, social and religious tensions in contemporary India. The sales agent is also handling Sheffield Doc Fest winner The Silence of Others (screening in Best of Fests), executive produced by Pedro Almodóvar, directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar. The film looks at the epic struggle for justice and recognition for victims of the Franco dictatorship. It is in the running for the European Film Award, as is another of Cinephil’s titles, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s The Distant Barking of Dogs, about a 10-year-old boy growing up in war-ravaged eastern Ukraine.

The Silence of Others

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Kowarsky has also revealed details of the hugely ambitious release plans for Roberta Grossman’s Who Will Write Our History, which tells the story of the hidden ‘Oyneg Shabes’ archive of 30,000 documents buried in 1943 on the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The documentary is executive-produced by Nancy Spielberg (Steven Spielberg’s sister).

It will be released on 27 January, International Holocaust Memorial Day. The film will be shown that day all over America and across Europe in venues including synagogues as well as cinemas, and will screen in UNESCO in Paris and in Auschwitz. Abramorama and Cinephil are overseeing this one-day global push for the film. Cinephil has already concluded a deal on the film for Germany and France with ARTE. Here in Amsterdam, the company is also presenting Amos Gitai’s short, Letter to a Friend in Gaza (screening in IDFA’s Masters).

Last year at the Forum, Cinephil picked up arts documentary project The Self Portrait, about anorexic Lene Marie Fossen, who is also a brilliant photographer. This is directed by Katja Høgset and produced by Margreth Olin for Speranza Film. “I am very proud of that film. I am proud because of the topic, I am proud because of the team… I think it is such an important story to tell, to bring out the anorexic story in a smart and arty way”, Kowarsky comments of the project. •

Losing Alaska team shoots Troubles doc The team behind Dublin-based docmaker Tom Burke’s international premiere of Losing Alaska (Frontlight) have partnered on a second project. Producers Jessie Fisk and Alan Maher of Marcie Films are collaborating with Burke’s on Shooting the Darkness, about local photographers in Belfast who covered The Troubles in Northern Ireland from 1968 The film is due to be shown for the first time on Irish broadcaster RTE in January next year. Originally commissioned as an arts doc, the film has now been given

a prime time slot and will go out on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday (the incident in 1972 when British soldiers shot unarmed civilians during a peaceful march in Derry).

Losing Alaska looks at the plight of the residents of Newtok, Alaska, a remote town with a population of less than 400. “They are losing land at the rate of around 50 feet a year,” Burke notes of the effect climate change is having on the Alaskan town.

Coastal erosion is only one of the problems the community faces. A tribal dispute has added to the conflict and turmoil in the community. Burke first visited Newtok in 2015 and immersed himself in the community there. “It’s an American village. You’ve got the post office, you’ve

got the high school, but no sanitation and they catch most of their own food.

It’s this weird hybrid – they’ve got no running water but they’ve got Facebook on their phones. It’s a Yup’ik culture but they primarily speak English. They catch their own dinner but they’ve got HBO”, Burke explains the clash of cultures in a town that is now under extreme threat.

The town is predicted to disappear within 5 years. The film is sold by Taskovski. All rights are available. •

By Geoffrey Macnab

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Collision course

ARTE launches additional €3m doc funding strand

The Collider: Chapter One, created by the UK creative duo of Amy Rose and May Abdalla (Anagram), fuses the physical and the virtual within an intriguing and delightful, and at times profound, 40-minute, two-person DocLab experience

Within the space of The Collider, one person wears a headset and is manipulated (both physically and within the virtual world) by the actions of the other person. It therefore becomes an experience defined by a delicious sense of spatial uncertainty. The world is vast when rendered digitally but tiny and intimate within the shared confines of the installation, and a choreography develops which is played out in physical and virtual terms.

We are plunged further into the realms of the senses by aural and olfactory prompts. A prologue calls for preparation on the part of both participants ahead of the experience, while an epilogue allows for joint reflection afterwards. “There is something about the metaphorical correlation between being near somebody whose space you physically share, but whose reality you don’t,” comments Abdalla.

“What we are interested in at Anagram is physical interactions or physical experiences that lend themselves to a feeling which we can work with,” adds partner Rose. “What is the environment that somebody could step into that is going to play a sensation onto their skin... It makes for a genuine resonance between the story that is going on and the experience they are having in their body.”

Like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s extraordinary Academy-award winning VR installation Carne y Arena, which recently exhibited in Amsterdam, Enter the Collider’s triptych structure of preparation, engagement and reflection ups the ante in terms of emotional and intellectual engagement.

(Interestingly, the action in both installations is played out on a floor of soft sand.)

“The flow of your experience as an audience member, as a participant, is so caught up with those things that happen before the beginning and at the end, and they have real symbolic power and you can use them in the story,” says Anagram’s Rose. “We wanted to try and find ways of using that transition within a story. Just like the humour of someone [being observed] wearing the VR headset, we wanted to play with that. And then we started thinking, what can that be about? What are the dynamics at play? And what is the symbolism of the machine?” • By Nick Cunningham

Bernd Müller Photo: Melle Meivogel

Franco-German broadcaster ARTE has launched a new €3m funding strand aimed at encouraging French and German producers to collaborate on more big-budget documentaries. Melanie Goodfellow reports

Photos: Nichon Glerum

For the record, The Collider is an anagram both of ‘trilled echo’ and ‘direct hello’: two of my very distinct responses within the installation.

Bernd Mütter, managing director and programme director at the broadcaster’s ARTE G.E.I.E. headquarters in Strasbourg, unveiled the initiative, known as the Grand Accord Documentary, during an IDFA industry session on Monday.

Finance for the new fund will be provided by ARTE’s three separate poles of ARTE G.E.I.E, ARTE France in Paris and ARTE Deutschland in Baden-Baden, which will each put up €1m annually.

Mütter says ARTE decided to create the fund on the back of its experiences with a number of high-end documentary features and series involving French and German partners in recent years, including Clash of Futures 1918-1939; Age of Iron – To Love and Die in the Thirty Years’ War; Gutenberg – Genius and Businessman and the mini-series Sixty Eight. “These last three or four years we’ve had some great experiences with German-French – and sometimes German-French-European – co-productions in the field of documentary”, Mütter says.

All these productions had shown the potential of Franco-German documentary co-productions, he said. But at the same time, they had also revealed the difficulties that arise because of the different budget and rights structures between the two countries. “In addition, our structure as a Franco-German channel makes it more difficult for producers to collaborate on Franco-German co-productions. It’s seen as easier for them to work alone, than with a French or German partner. This is obviously not ARTE’s objective,” Mütter says.

The new fund is loosely inspired by ARTE’s 20-year-old Grand Accord Cinema, which has supported films such as Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher and Ruben Östlund’s The Square, Mütter says.

“Rather than copy Grand Accord Cinema, we decided to take the best of that idea and transfer it to the world of documentaries,” says Mütter. “We believe in this European multi-perspective approach and our hope is that the new Grand Accord Documentary will encourage producers to come forward with ambitious content that has an appeal all over Europe.” The aim would be to split the annual €3m pot between five to seven projects a year with expectation that awardees would also be raising a big chunk of their budgets through other sources.

In return for its investment, ARTE would expect first transmission rights and exclusive broadcasting rights and rights for use on ARTE’s increasingly popular catch-up platform. It would also ask for non-exclusive, European rights for online availability in all the European languages used by ARTE. One of Europe’s biggest investors in documentary content, ARTE is out in force at IDFA once again this year, having backed more than 30 films or upcoming projects being presented at the festival including Wang Bing’s Dead Souls, Werner Herzog and André Singer’s Meeting Gorbachev and First Appearance contender Giacinto Scelsi.

The First Motion of the Immovable. •

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DOCS FROM FLANDERS PROUDLY PRESENTING AT IDFA 2018

Competition for Short Documentary Dutch Premiere

CO-PRODUCTIONS WITH FLANDERS Frontlight International Premiere

EVERYTHING MUST FALL

By REHAD DESAI Co-Produced by STORYHOUSEFILM

IDFA Competition for First Appearance International Premiere

Design: Team Flanders

MANU

By EMMANUELLE BONMARIAGE Co-Produced by CLIN D’OEIL FILMS

Luminous World Premiere

AMMODO × IDFA I DFA Com p et it ion Program s 2018 A M MOD O. ORG

L&F Producties presenteert in coproductie met KRO-NCRV een film van Petra Lataster-Czisch & Peter Lataster

NPO Fund is proud to support the following film screenings at IDFA: #pestverhaal 180cc Bellingcat - Truth in a Post-Truth World But Now Is Perfect Good Neighbours Lenno & the Angelfish L I S T E N The Man Who Looked Beyond the Horizon ‘Now something is slowly changing’ Outside In Skip and the Rhythm Rangers You Are My Friend

www.npo-fonds.nl

montage

Mario Steenbergen Camera Peter Lataster geluid Gertjan Miedema uitvoerend producent MARTY DE JONG geluidsnabewerking Hugo Dijkstal kleurcorrectie PETRO VAN LEEUWEN grafisch ontwerp PETRA WARRINK & BERRY SLOK eindredactie JELLE PETER DE RUITER omroep KRO-NCRV Deze film kwam tot stand met steun van KRO-NCRV, NPO Fonds en Nederlands Filmfonds jijbentmijnvriend.nl

jijbentmijnvriend

NU IN DE FILMTHEATERS

The business of kids The session kicks off with round table pitches of two children’s documentaries in development. The Norwegian doc Kids Cup, directed by Line Hatland and produced

by Medieoperatørene, follows 6 young football players from different parts of the planet on their quest to win the biggest youth tournament in the world, while in the cross-media project Cabinets of Wonder children take us on a trip into their inner worlds, covering topics such as friendship, belonging and fear.

This is followed by a panel on documentary series for children, investigating the creative possibilities of the format as well as international potential. Two projects will be presented during the session: My Faith (directed

by Cathrine Marchen Asmussen, produced

by Lise Saxtrup/Klassefilm) and Just Kids (directed by Els van Driel, produced by EO).

“November 20 is Universal Children’s Day,” points out IDFA’s Head of Education Meike Statema. “Every episode of Just Kids is based on one of the articles within that convention

[the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child], such as every child’s right to a home or safety. These presentations will show that there are doc series for kids that can find a place across international TV slots and platforms.”

The post-lunch session comprises two pitches of Dutch feature-length documentaries including Sweeties (director Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden & Natalie Bruijns, producer Witfilm) and Paperclip (director Shamira Raphaëla, producer Tangerine Tree). These are produced under the aegis of Dok Junior, a new collaboration between The Netherlands Film Fund, HUMAN, Cinekid and IDFA, aimed at the development, production and distribution of distinctive and original long-form documentaries for children aged 9 to 12 years.

“We are asking professionals to prepare

Platforming truth Submarine, the Amsterdam and LAbased company run by Femke Wolting and Bruno Felix, has revealed further details of its many films, docs and VR projects, Geoffrey Macnab reports Here at IDFA, Submarine’s Bellingcat – Truth in a Post-Truth World, directed by Hans Pool, world premiered in Frontlight, having previously pitched at IDFA Forum. Wolting (who runs SubLA) has revealed that Submarine is now setting up an interactive platform to support the film. “It will be connected to the film, but it will also be a way for the audience to learn more about the investigation techniques and to apply them themselves, and to collaborate with the Bellingcat team,” Wolting explains. Submarine’s sister distribution company Periscoop has just released Bellingcat in Dutch cinemas across 20 cities to tie in with the IDFA premiere.

The company is working on The Singh Case, a new “true crime” doc series, again with Hans Pool directing. This is about Jason Singh, a Dutch man living in the US who was convicted of murdering his wife and daughter. He has been in prison for over 30 years, but his Dutch lawyer (Rachel Imamkhan who runs Prison Law, a foundation assisting prisoners abroad) discovered major flaws in Singh’s criminal case and is doing everything in her power to free him. Submarine is making this with Dutch TV network BNNVARA. The sales agent is About Premium Content.

Submarine is also preparing The Art of Stealing, a film about the art heists in Rotterdam committed by two Romanians in which a number of Picassos and Matisses were stolen from the Kunsthal museum. It is billed as a black comedy and will be made as a feature doc. The Film Fund is aboard, as is VPRO. Alexander Nanau (Toto and His Sisters) is the

Romanian co-producer.

The company is involved in IDFA’s DocLab with The Industry VR, a VR film looking at the economics of the Dutch drug business, a subject also touched on in another recent Submarine-produced DocLab project, Poppy Interactive, billed as a “protracted investigation into the nexus between war and organized crime, brought together in an interactive documentary that exposes an extensive network.”

These projects have their home on The Submarine Channel.

“We’ve had it for 15 years now. It’s our online playground, our testing ground for new ways of storytelling. We do VR installations. We did a game with Peter Greenaway a few years ago”, Wolting says of the online Channel. “It’s not so

feedback on these projects, and we recorded really nice short clips with kids reacting to them, so the target group get to have their say. That is really nice,” comments Statema.

“Feature-length documentaries for children are not that common. Norway is strong in this, but Holland has rarely produced one, so it is good to see how would that work, what kind of structure content-wise and creatively-wise, but also of course, how do we frame it? What platform? We are testing this and will discuss this with all the professionals attending to see what would they think.”

The professionals in attendance represent the key international funding agencies and broadcasters, Statema notes, and include the Danish Film Institute, AVEK and the Finnish Film Institute, Arte Junior, NRK, CBBC, CBS Korea, NHK Japan, VRT/Ketnet and VAF (Belgium). •

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much about making money as experimenting and seeing the boundaries of film in a new way.”

Wolting has revealed that she and Tommy Pallotta are working with Richard Linklater on an animated film about St Francis of Assisi. She and Pallotta also recently completed More Human Than Human, a film about AI that premiered at South By Southwest earlier this year (and is sold by Cinetic and Autlook).

Meanwhile, the prolific Pallotta and Wolting are continuing to work on their animated series for Amazon Global, Undone, which they are partnering on with former Disney boss Michael Eisner’s Tornante. This is show run by Kate Purdy and will be released in September next year. •

The Industry VR

Kids are again in the ascendant on November 21 during the Industry Day – Documentaries for Children programme at the IDFA Forum, which looked to stimulate international development and collaboration within the field of children’s documentaries, Nick Cunningham reports

Meike Statema

Cabinets of Wonder

Inside IDFA

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CAFE DE JAREN THE BEATING HEART OF IDFA OPEN ALL HOURS

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Kijk de beste IDFA-documentaires op NPO Start.

Bellingcat – Truth in a Post-Truth World (VPRO)

CAFÉ DE JAREN Nieuwe Doelenstraat 20 +31 20 625 57 71

Rokin

Sylvana, Demon or Diva (EO)

PATHÉ DE MUNT

Trapped in the City of a Thousand Mountains (HUMAN)

Muntplein

Amstel

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Vijzelst raat

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ein Rembrandtpl

CAFEDEJAREN.NL

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But Now Is Perfect (EO)

O amor é único (VPRO)

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Growing the Forum family IDFA festival director Orwa Nyrabia opened the festival’s Forum co-financing event on Monday with a call for its participants to embrace diversity throughout the documentary world. By Melanie Goodfellow “It’s wonderful to be in this room with all of you. Friends are asking me if I’m tired, and I’m saying tired of what?

There are so many good people in this family. That’s all I want to start this day with is to tell you, we are growing the family,” Nyrabia says. “I understand my mission to contribute to gradually move further and invite all of you to move further to a more pluralistic documentary family.

We are working on this in every sense of the word.”

Nyrabia’s words kicked off three busy days featuring 51 projects from 24 territories. Buzzy Central Pitch projects over Monday and Tuesday, included US-based Chinese director Nanfu Wang’s Untitled Cuba Project, capturing contemporary Cuba through the case of murdered civil rights activist Oswaldo Paya.

“I’m very happy to be here. It’s a great pitch. Nanfu is a great filmmaker. It’s a great story. We want to find out a bit more about the investigative side of the story and to what extent you’re going into a post-Castro world,” comments Kate Townsend, Director, Original Documentaries at Netflix, in the first time anyone from the streaming giant has publicly joined the decision-makers’ table at the Forum.

Israeli director David Wachsmann’s Lost Childhood, looking at the sinister strategy behind his country’s arrest and imprisonment of 700 Palestinian children a year, on minor charges such as throwing stones, also drew a strong response.

On a lighter note, The Happy Worker – Or How Bullshit Took over the Workplace seemed to strike a chord with many of the commissioners at the table, a number of them saying it was a subject that would chime with its audiences too.

Violeta Ayala’s crossmedia project Prison X, building on her feature film Cocaine Prison about life inside a notorious Bolivian jail, got a warm reception and a boost in an offer of technology support from the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which was accompanied by a travel and fellowship bursary from the Ford Fund to enable team member and illustrator Olivia Barron to take up the offer.

On a sadder note, Central Pitch moderator Rudy Buttignol also led a tribute to Orna Yarmut, the late founding chief of the CoPro documentary co-financing event in Tel Aviv, which supported scores of hard-hitting Israeli documentaries such as Five Broken Cameras and The Oslo Diaries. “She championed over two decades. Really important works which changed people’s attitudes about a very volatile part of the world,” he says. Buttignol recalled how Yarmut had raised funding from Israeli governments who were not happy about their film-makers “airing the country’s dirty laundry” to international audiences. “She thought the work was really important in promoting peace and understanding and championed independent filmmakers.”

The Forum continues on Wednesday with one-on-one meetings and Round Table pitches for documentaries aimed at younger audiences. •

SVOD: friend or foe?

Traditional documentary players and newcomers tussled over the implications of the rising influence of the streaming giants and SVOD in general at an IDFA industry talk entitled ‘SVOD – Repositioning the Documentary Film Market’ on November 20.

Public broadcasters in the room appeared to push back against the big streaming players, who are disrupting traditional financing channels, but not actually coming up with equal levels of investment.

Axel Arno of Sweden’s SVT said the public broadcaster had looked deep within to see what it could do to compete against the newcomers, for both audience share and hot projects, and was trying to market both its content and footprint better.

Paul Pauwels, who has been overseeing the EDN’s Media and Society: European Documentary in a Changing Media Landscape research project, painted a bleak picture on the basis of its initial findings, and warned that the industry needed to wake up to the fact that the rising profile of digital giants did not correspond with increased investment by these players.

“I’ve said it many, many times: I am part of the dinosaur generation, I really, really mean it. Documentaries are being made and will continue to be made, but for a dying audience, or a diminishing audience, and I am not sure if we as a documentary world are ready to react to that,” Pauwels says.

“I’ve already used the image of dinosaurs who look into the sky and who see the meteorite of the digital environment coming closer and closer, it’s been coming closer for three, four years already and now it’s fairly big and I think it’s going to hit us very, very soon.”

“I am afraid that everything that’s happening now in this world of internet technology and streaming services, I think at the moment it is profitable for a couple of big companies but it’s a big danger for the community of documentary-makers.”

Pauwel shared preliminary data from the study suggesting that 3% of current funding for documentaries in Europe came from digital platforms, with public broadcasters and film funds still providing the lion’s share. He said that if the state broadcasters were disrupted out of existence, there would be an inevitable funding gap.

Other speakers on the industry talk, co-hosted with Creative Europe Desk NL and Flanders, included European Commission’s Marijn Duijvestein, Justine Nagan, head of US documentary specialist American Documentary/P.O.V and James Bridges of documentary streaming documentary platform iwonder.

Bridges countered Pauwels comments saying that platforms like his tapped into new audiences, rather than stealing existing market share, but admitted when pushed that it did not yet have substantial amounts of funding to invest in documentaries at the development and production stage.

“It’s been eye-opening to listen to you all speak, but I will say that Europe is a very different marketplace from other parts of the world, like Asia.” • By Melanie Goodfellow

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IDFAcademy

It’s all academic IDFAcademy 2018 closed its doors November 20 after four days of intensive, top-level training activity and support. Three dynamic new doc-makers tell Nick Cunningham about the experience

The Column of Truth

Jean-Michel Frodon

In an age defined in part by the cynical manipulation of audio-visual media, we asked leading filmmakers and critics to discuss the concept of truth; our responsibility towards it and the means of measuring it. In our final column, critic and teacher Jean-Michel Frodon discusses unending personal truth in film.

Laura Peetoom Sonia Benslama & Milisuthando Bongela Photo: Melle Meivogel

The IDFAcademy offer to young documentarians was as impressive and all-encompassing as ever in 2018, as the great and the good of the doc world gathered to share their knowledge and experience across all disciplines.

Luminaries such as Errol Morris, Sophie Fiennes, Pawel Lozinski, Nicolas Philibert and Ester Gould were on hand to guide the 100 young and emerging makers through the choppy waters of doc production, while top talent from the sales and distribution sectors placed matters within a business context.

Approachable

French/Tunisian filmmaker Sonia Benslama, nominated by French authors’ association La Scam, was there with her US-based doc project 360 North Main Street, which she is looking to shoot in 2019. “I attended a very interesting workshop [given by producer/psychotherapist Rebecca Day] about the emotional risk of making a film, about the risk we encounter as filmmakers when we go to really tough places and experience really hard things, and how these can affect us,” she comments, adding, “It is very interesting to be [made] aware of what is happening outside France and how things work with the broadcasters, distributors and sales agents; things that I didn’t really know before arriving here.

It was a great experience.”

Was she surprised at the level of expert talent on hand to offer support? “No, but what did surprise me was how nice and approachable they were… I shared my project with a lot of people at the round tables, and then at the end of the day you had the time to talk with the other participants too, which was great.”

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Feedback

South African filmmaker Milisuthando Bongela, attending with her producer Marion Isaacs, was given the opportunity to attend IDFAcademy after winning the pitch prize at the Durban Film Festival. She describes her project as “a coming of age personal essay in which I track what happened after Apartheid.

How did black and white people begin to live together after 342 years of racial segregation? So I look at that through my generation, and how we were the first generation of black children to attend white schools. The film basically takes us into those very intimate spaces immediately after Apartheid.”

Bongela describes the daunting prospect of pitching the project again in Amsterdam. “It was extremely nerve-wracking, it was awful to prepare for. It was torture to anticipate pitching the project to people from Eastern Europe or Kurdish people or Argentinians who I had never encountered in my life. And of course to the real judges; people like Mandy Chang from BBC Storyville; people from ARTE who I never thought I would have access to.”

“It was the kind of pain that is really excruciating, but the kind of pain you want to feel as somebody who is making something, as a creative and as a storyteller, because the feedback is immediate. And even though it is criticism, it is constructive criticism, so it actually means you are improving your project by sharing it. It was a pain that was definitely worth it.”

The South African filmmaker further underlines the benefits of intensive training activity among filmmakers with projects at all stages of development.

“There are people whose films are just ideas and people who have 45-minute rough cuts. People from all over the world, and for four days you can talk about and get responses to your story.

You get questions about things you took for granted but that actually other people had no idea about, which means that in essence you are improving your story as you go along… And meeting experts, it was really nice to sit at a table with Mohamad Siam and for him to give me feedback on my film was amazing, considering I watched both his films and was mad about them. It was an education.”

Connect

Young Dutch producer Laura Peetoom of Zeppers Film & TV was one of four IDFAcademy inductees nominated by the Netherlands Film Fund. “There was a tsunami of information and there was a lot to take in, but for me it was a really big learning school and I just absorbed all the information and I got to talk to as many people as I possibly could”, she stresses.

Peetcom is currently in post-production on The Good Terrorist, about a former terrorist who tries to re-integrate into Dutch society. The film will be ready early 2019 and she is currently working on the theatrical release strategy.

“I really liked to get to learn about the other participants at IDFAcademy, to see where they stand and what their ideas are,” she comments. “And I liked the one-on-one meetings. You really got to connect with the experts, like the person behind a festival or co-producers. The whole experience was very good.” •

I’ve been asked to answer one of two questions: either what is our responsibility towards truth or how do we measure truth? I’d say the answer to both questions is the same. I don’t speak here of the truth in general, on which I have no particular title to express myself, assuming it even exists. I talk about the truth in films. It seems to me that there is finally only one criterion: our ability, individually in the experience of the film, and possibly in a collective way (whether just 2 people or thousands) by exchanging spoken or written words after watching the film, of successive approaches to... what? Still not the truth, but rather the truth tenor of each film, depending on its way both to look at the world and to speak to us, the audience, to me, the spectator.

This experience is infinitely fragile, unstable – it must be, there is no other choice. It’s always been like that since La Sortie des usines Lumière, it’s always the case – for what we call fiction as well as for what we call documentary.

Whoever would try to impose rules, criteria of veracity, will lock up and knock out films (and spectators), without having advanced by a millimetre the cause of this famous truth, which is not a thing – it passes, it vibrates, and sometimes vanishes as quickly as it came. And just as there is no other measure of the truth of a film than what I can feel from it, with the resources of my sensitivity, my intelligence, my emotional and critical capacities, it is my responsibility, as a spectator – and also, at a larger scale, as a critic – to seek to measure, evaluate – and if necessary reassess – the truth content of a shot, a camera angle, a cut and a glue during editing, an association between an image and a sound, a music. It never stops.

Hopefully. •

Visions of China Masters

Chinese Portrait

Xiaoshuai Wang Photo: Melle Meivogel

Xiaoshuai Wang

Renowned filmmaker tells Melanie Goodfellow about travelling across China for his first-ever documentary Celebrated Chinese director Xiaoshuai Wang has been capturing the contemporary reality of his compatriots for more than a quarter of a century in his award-winning fiction features including Frozen, Beijing Bicycle and 11 Flowers.

The director, a habitué of the Berlinale and Cannes Film Festival, touches down at IDFA this year with his first-ever documentary, Chinese Portrait. The work consists of a series of three-to-four minute filmed portraits capturing everyday scenes of life across the country.

Memory

It is among a dozen documentaries screening across IDFA this year capturing life in contemporary China, including Yang Zhang’s Up the Mountain, about an artist giving lessons in a remote mountain village, and David Verbeek’s Trapped in the City of a Thousand Mountains, about the suppressed rap culture of Chongqing.

Wang explains that Chinese Portrait was inspired by the work of Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong, a member of the NeoRealist movement in China in the 1990s who is best known for his paintings capturing everyday life in the country. He is a friend and long-time collaborator of Xiaoshuai’s, even playing the lead role in the director’s debut feature, The Days.

“We met at the Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He liked to work outside, painting people in situ rather than in the studio. This influenced me. I wanted to do the same thing, but it’s easier for an artist to work in that way, they just have to step outside. With film, it’s more difficult. You have a budget and a crew, it’s an industrial process. But I wanted to try nonetheless to use the camera and film, to work as painters do. Artists often jot down images, which they keep for a long time and refer back to, I wanted to do the same thing as a filmmaker, to shoot something and keep these images... as a memory. I think it’s important.”

Changes

Wang says that this urge to capture contemporary China was also driven by his concern about the rapid changes sweeping across Chinese society and its landscape amid the rampant economic growth of the last 20 years.

“I am worried by that. There is this obsession with change and everything that is new, but it’s so easy to destroy old things and history. I don’t think it’s good. That is the problem with China, we’ve lost our history, our memory,” says the filmmaker. “Capturing these scenes, either on film or in a painting, is very important. Even if these images are destroyed, we’ll still have an image.”

Contemporary

Wang spent nine years, beginning in 2009, shooting the scenes on-and-off in between projects. “My target destination was big. [...] We’d go to certain cities, travelling by plane, train and then strike out from there with a small crew by car and see where it took us. When you live in a big city like Shanghai or Beijing, you have no idea of the everyday lives of people living in China’s outer reaches, or forget the country’s rural lifestyles.”

Each clip consists of a contemporary scene in which most of life continues as normal but one or two figures stand stock still, gazing fixedly into the camera.

Wang started out shooting on celluloid, using a four by three ratio to capture the look of traditional film, but had to cross over to digital as celluloid was phased out and he could no longer easily get hold of the stock.

Getting passers-by to participate and setting up the shots on the hoof required different skills from those Wang had perfected on the film set, he says. “It was a new job for me, very different from feature films, going onto the streets, looking for a scene and then persuading people to stay for the shot. I had to do it quickly, there was no question of

taking a whole day. I’d beg people to give me three or four minutes of their time. Most people would agree, but even then three, four minutes is quite a long time to stand still”, says Wang.

The resulting film gives a fascinating overview of contemporary China in all its diversity. The scenes are diverse as they are intriguing. To list but a few, they span a man in bathing trunks on a packed beach; Muslims at prayer in the outer Western reaches of the country; fishermen and women sitting on a dock, mending nets; factory workers sitting at their machines; farmers with their flocks; rush-hour in the city; dispossessed home-owners trudging through mud with imposing tower-blocks being constructed in the background.

Tiananmen Square

Wang also puts himself in a few scenes, notably one on Tiananmen Square, the site of the 1989 student protestor massacres, the legacy of which resonates in many of his early films, and on the back of a train as he heads West in search of new scenes.

“It’s a reflection of my feeling, my opinions about the country. This is the moment when I put myself in. In a fiction feature film, I wouldn’t dare to do that, but in this documentary, I want to show I was there, in that environment, with all these images in China”, Wang says.

The director explains he has deliberately not labelled each clip with exact detail of where it was shot. “I shot in so many places all over China and in so many provinces, but I didn’t go everywhere... I didn’t want to get into discussions on why I didn’t visit certain places. I just didn’t write it. You can see different Chinas, you can see different places. That was enough.” •

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30-10-18 11:31

Over the fence

Nikolaus Geyrhalter Photo: Corinne de Korver

“You can really transfer spaces and environments into the cinema room.”

Geoffrey Macnab talks to Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter about filming his Feature-Length contender The Border Fence Feature-Length Competition The irony about Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s new feature documentary The Border Fence, screening in IDFA’s Feature-Length competition, is that the fence in question was never erected.

The Austrian director had come to the Brenner Pass because he had heard about the plans to build an imposing barrier in the Alps between Austria and Italy, to keep refugees at bay. “I was really very unhappy basically about the idea that Europe was separating,” Geyrhalter remembers. “The main idea was to follow the construction of the fence and see what it did to the area.”

Focus

When it became obvious that the fence wasn’t going to be built, the filmmaker shifted his perspective. “The first year, we were still expecting maybe the fence would be set up. The second year, it was very evident it wouldn’t be set up. From that point, the focus of the film was much clearer. It was about us as Europeans and Austrians, who were intending to build the fence and were afraid of something. It became more interesting to me to look into our people’s [Austrians’] eyes – to confront them with the idea of the fence and to see what they were afraid of… the focus was on those who believe they have to defend whatever they have to defend, with the help of fences.”

Tight-knit

The director gathered responses from many locals (lorry drivers, bar workers, toll-booth operators, farmers, cops and many others) to the immigration crisis. The key to winning the trust of the Austrian villagers was spending time with them. This was a small, tight-knit community. When the villagers realised that Geyrhalter and his team weren’t one of those crews who “came for a day and then leave again,” they opened up to him. He paid attention to them and allowed them to speak at length.

Geyrhalter admits he was “sometimes surprised” by the measured responses he was given. “It was a relief to me that people kept their own way of thinking and that they weren’t just brainwashed by the media,” Geyrhalter reflects. “I was very happy to hear sometimes very profound opinions, even from farmers and people who you wouldn’t necessarily expect to think so much about what is going on… obviously, we were hoping this could happen, but you never know.”

Geyrhalter himself was born in Vienna but grew up in an area on the edge of the city, close to the woods. “I am a child of Vienna but I spent a lot of time outside of the city.” His family had a holiday house in the country and he was always familiar with rural life. “I found it easier to communicate with the people in the country and I feel somehow closer to them. Conversation is easier, more informal and somehow more honest.”

Overlap

Ask the director if there is an “Austrian sensibility” and he acknowledges some overlaps between his work and that of fellow directors such as Ulrich Seidl and Michael Glawogger.

“I am not sure that there is a sensibility. I think what we have is a funding system that gives us the chance to develop. We have the chance to produce documentaries that do not necessarily have to compete with commercial documentaries,” Geyrhalter suggests. “This is the main key.”

The Border Fence is sold internationally by Autlook. It has already been released in Austrian cinemas, but IDFA marks its first screenings outside of this home market. The film was well received by the critics, but Geyrhalter saw that audiences were growing “sick” of films dealing with such topics. “I have the feeling that people more and more go to the cinema to be entertained. They don’t want the cinema to deal with serious topics that they have in the news.”

Cinema experience

The Border Fence may be about contentious subject matter, but it is very calmly filmed. When he does interviews, Geyrhalter says, he will go to great lengths to find the best setting for his subjects. He shoots in a tableau-like fashion, with wide-angle static framing and with interviewees almost always at the centre of the image. The Border Fence has its moments of humour, but it is not a “feel-good movie”, although that is what many spectators now seem to want.

“It is getting hard to present serious films in the cinema.”

Whatever resistance he encounters, Geyrhalter aims to keep on making films for the cinema audience. He will work with VOD platforms and broadcasters but believes “the experience in cinema is different. Of course, it is filled with other people. That makes it a special experience.”

The Border Fence has been included in IDFA’s programme on Space in documentary. “I think one of the big advantages of producing films for the cinema and the big screen is that you can really transfer spaces and environments into the cinema room,” Geyrhalter suggests.

Earth-mover

The Austrian has been coming to IDFA for many years.

“Basically, it’s the place to be – not for all films, but for many,” he suggests. “For me personally, it is too big and you can get a little bit lost, but still you know that you will meet everybody here and there are so many opportunities in terms of what you can see.”

Having finished The Border Fence, the Austrian director is already getting his hands dirty with a new project. Earth (working title) is about “humans moving earth… the fact is, nature moves a lot of soil and stones and earth by natural means like tides and earthquakes. But we move a much larger amount of earth than nature does. From a geological point of view, we are the main factor. That is what the film is about.” •

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