IDFA Special 23, 24 & 25 November 2012

POSITIVE SALES

Times might be hard for the documentary industry, but the atmosphere at the 17th edition of Docs for Sale, which winds down on Friday, has been remarkably positive this year, the event’s coordinator Laurien ten Houten tells Melanie Goodfellow.

Yesterday saw the inaugural IDFA Congress: Dutch Docs Conquer the World! “We designed this to celebrate, inform and inspire Dutch filmmakers to think outside the box because of the current jeopardy within Dutch funding, and 220 Dutch people receiving a higher level of analysis. Maybe out of this will spring some creative action in the field of creative documentary”, moderator Peter Wintonick told the IDFA Special.

Photo: Nichon Glerum

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL

With ticket sales buoyant and the sun shining over the Compagnietheater (where the IDFA Congress was in full swing), Festival Director Ally Derks was in cheery mood Thursday lunchtime. The 25th IDFA may have had the occasional hiccup, but the festival has celebrated its jubilee with style and passion, she tells Geoffrey Macnab.

The Festival is on target to reach over 200,000 admissions and to generate over €1 million in box-office returns by the weekend.

That, Derks contends, is a very solid performance in a period when other Dutch festivals have been losing spectators in a tough economic climate. “We really thought we could sell 10% less because of the experiences of other film festivals, but now we will have more… we are already even with last year.”

BROAD CHURCH It helps that IDFA isn’t just a “highbrow, academic film festival.” Alongside the doc enthusiasts, Ajax FC fans were lured to screenings of The King – Jari Litmanen (with the Finnish player himself in attendance to greet his admirers). With everybody from Rwandan drummers (accompanying Fight Like Soldiers Die Like Children) to pop idol Rick Springfield (An Affair of the Heart) providing the soundtrack, there was also plenty of music at this year’s IDFA. Yes, Derks acknowledges, the budget cuts and threatened closure of the Dutch Cultural Media Fund have been on festivalgoers’ minds. “But we are a documentary community so we don’t give up easily.”

Asked to list her own highlights, Derks points to the medal she received for “services to the city of Amsterdam” at the opening of the Festival; the African drumming; the way Albert (the wheelchairbound protagonist of Little World) enraptured IDFA audiences; the moving discussions of captivity and torture with Maziar Bahari and Orwa Nyrabia and – on a lighter note – the distributors’ party

DOCS FOR SALE TOP 10 1.

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Wrong Time Wrong Place ............................... 88 Black Out ........................................................ 70 Miss Nikki and the Tiger Girls ........................ 69 I Am Breathing................................................ 61 Camera/Woman .............................................. 52 Sexy Baby ........................................................ 51 Bad Boy High Security Cell ............................. 50 Bravehearts ...................................................... 46 Fallen City....................................................... 46 F*ck for Forest................................................. 44

where all and sundry burst into a chorus of We Are The World.

As for the social side of the festival, Derks believes the Marie-Stella-Maris tent in the square recaptured at least a little of the flavour of IDFA’S old home, De Balie. On the occasion of IDFA’s 25th birthday, some old timers have waxed nostalgic about when the festival was a more intimate event. Derks has some sympathy with this point of view. “I love to go to small festivals. But doesn’t the documentary world deserve a Cannes? There are so many small festivals – be happy there’s one big one!”

One event already being hatched for next year is a major congress looking at freedom of speech in Asia, in countries from Burma to Cambodia and Vietnam. And IDFA plans to extend an invitation to Burmese politician and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

POETRY TO PROPAGANDA Some observers have criticized the role that NGOs now play in documentary funding. Derks doesn’t think this is a problem. “Of course, you always have to take care you don’t spread the ideology of that NGO… but if they don’t have a say in the filmmaking, who cares where the money comes from?”

As for her tastes, they are famously elastic. She has never wanted IDFA to be dogmatic or doctrinaire in its programming. “I like everything between poetry and propaganda,” she reflects. “I have a broad taste. That’s what I said in my opening speech. I love flowers. I don’t love only tulips or roses.”

MERRY-GO-ROUND Next January, the International Film Festival Rotterdam is planning a joint venture with CPH: DOX to support art films.

However, Derks isn’t worried by Rotterdam upping its emphasis on docs. “We have very good relations with Rotterdam”, she says.

“I am very happy that Rotterdam discovered documentary. I cannot show everything!”

Once this year’s IDFA ends, Derks will head off on the annual IDFA tour to Vlieland. Then, after a brief respite over Christmas, she will be off to Sundance and Berlin as the yearly festival merrygo-round begins to turn again. Her enthusiasm hasn’t waned in the slightest as she finishes one IDFA and begins to think about the next. The dates for the 26th edition have now been set. The Festival will run from Wednesday 20th November to Sunday 1st December, 2013.

“The situation is pretty similar to recent years. Broadcasters are paying less and less per hour and sales agents are having a hard time, but in spite of that the atmosphere at the market has been good”, says Ten Houten looking back over the past week’s activities.

Attendance numbers were slightly up on last year, with 295 acquisition agents attending, against 294 in 2011. Viewing figures were also slightly up. Top titles in terms of viewings included Wrong Time Wrong Place, Black Out, Miss Nikki and the Tiger Girls, I Am Breathing, Camera/Woman, Sexy Baby, Bad Boy High Security and Bravehearts.

Ten Houten noted that many of the films in this year’s festival selection came with sales agents attached ahead of the market. “In the past, a lot of titles would find a sales agent during Docs for Sale, but the sales agents are increasingly proactive in picking up films and looking at titles as soon as IDFA announces its selection.”

Jan Rofekamp of Transit Films reported a fairly busy market and that he had sealed US TV sales for films including An Affair of the Heart and the library title Virgin Tales. “We’ve had a lot of interest for our slate and we will do deals post-IDFA, but the buyers and commissioners don’t have the power to acquire things on their own like they did in the past. They have to go their broadcasters and get it signed off first.”

Aside from the physical market at Arti et Amicitiae and the Forum, IDFA organised one of its most comprehensive industry panels to date, including talks on the Chinese documentary industry, how to sell short films and the flourishing Arab documentary scene. “This year we opened them up to everyone with a festival accreditation and that really worked well”, comments Ten Houten.

Docs for Sale may be shutting its doors for this year at the end of business on Friday but professionals can continue to watch the line-up on DfS Online. The service will also be updated throughout the year, with big documentary titles premiering at festivals like Berlin, Cannes and Toronto.

IDFA’s Docs for Sale team will also be at Berlin next year as part of Meet the Docs (a collaboration between EFM and EDN) at the European Film Market, through which a selection of films at this edition of IDFA will be screened in the market.

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In The Shadow Of The Sun............................ 9,2 Searching for Sugar Man ................................ 9,2 Bravehearts ..................................................... 9,0 Little World ................................................... 9.0 The Sound of Belgium ................................... 9.0 Rafea: Solar Mama ......................................... 9.0 The Only Son ................................................ 8.9 I Am Breathing............................................... 8.8 Sweet Dreams ................................................. 8.8 The Gatekeepers............................................. 8.8 IDFA – 1

CARAVAN OF LOVE

Kamar Ahmad Simon and Sara Afreen

They may be IDFA debutants, but Bangladeshi director/producer team Kamar Ahmad Simon and Sara Afreen can already claim IDFA credentials with a film that received research and script support from the Jan Vrijman Fund (now the IDFA Bertha Fund), was developed at the IDFAcademy in 2010 and which will also be distributed in the Benelux by the IDFA Bertha Fund. The pair’s Are You Listening! opened Dok Leipzig earlier this month and plays at IDFA in Reflecting Images: Panorama. The film focusses on the devastating floods that assail Bangladesh’s coastline ever year. “The film is about a small family in a small community who take fate into their own hands and reclaim their land,” Ahmad Simon says. “It’s a basic human journey of struggle and survival, striving to live and striving to breathe – and to love. If one does not have the love for life, one does not have the desire to live. Even at the extreme ends of the earth, these people are the same as we all are.”

LOOK BACK AT IDFA Docs for Sale may ‘only’ have started up in 1996, but DfS supremo Fred de Haas has been attending the festival almost since the very beginning. Just as much as the market he co-founded, Fred can justifiably be seen as an IDFA Institution.

Photo: Nadine Maas

Producer Afreen outlines their December 2012 release strategy for the film back home in Bangladesh. “We are organising a private, alternative nationwide distribution plan. We will make a caravan and move from one place to another and the whole operation will be conducted in collaboration with more than 100 film societies in Bangladesh.”

“This is our first feature and the experience has been unbelievable because you get the best of audiences, the best of critics and the best of programmers, so you are testing yourself ”, Kamar Ahmad Simon adds. “We want to take this experience and build up an understanding of how documentary films are shaping up, and how IDFA is positioned. This is just the start and we want to have a long-term relationship, coming back and forth to IDFA. I am very much more confident after this festival.”

Nick Cunningham

ROAST BEEF RAMPS UP London-based Roast Beef Productions is ramping up. Here at IDFA, director/producer Havana Marking unveiled her new feature doc Smash & Grab – The Story of the Pink Panthers in the main competition. Sold by Goldcrest, the film was backed by the British Film Institute and is expected to be given a UK theatrical release before surfacing on the BBC’s Storyville.

Marking also revealed that she and her colleagues are working on a handful of eye-catching new projects.

She herself is preparing feature doc Death of a Diva about the death of Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamin, brutally murdered at her home in Dubai in 2008.

Her colleague Martin Herring is involving a hybrid doc about pop Svengali Malcolm McLaren. “It’s the story of Malcolm McLaren’s life and his ability to re-invent, recreate and change the world”, Marking says of the project. Here at IDFA, Roast Beef ’s Mike Lerner was at the Forum earlier this week pitching Kyoko Miyake’s Brakeless, which uses a fatal train crash in Japan to explore Japanese ideas about punctuality and punishment.

Another Roast Beef project, White Elephants, from director Kristof Bilsen, was also pitched.

Meanwhile, Roast Beef is close to completing a new feature doc about Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot. Marking enjoyed international success with her feature doc Afghan Star (2009), which won both Audience & Directing Awards at Sundance in 2009.

Smash & Grab tells the story of notorious jewel thieves The Pink Panthers. As Marking points out, the Panthers are currently in retreat. The behaviour of the thieves is also changing. Many have been arrested in recent months. Recently, in one raid in Greece, there was a murder during one of their heists. “In the whole time of my film and the whole history of the Pink Panthers, there was never a murder before”, Marking observes.

“That is why they remained gentlemen thieves. In fact, as predicted by the policeman in the film, as new ones come along who are less experienced, they become more violent.”

Geoffrey Macnab

IDFA HISTORY IN BRIEF

PART IV: 2003 – 2007

Financial crisis, globalisation, immigration, Burma, Iran, Islamic Fundamentalism, the Arab Spring and the digital revolution were some of the key topics dominating IDFA over the past five years. As the global recession initially sparked by the America’s subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 deepened, Erwin Wagenhofer’s Let’s Make Money, a timely critique of financial liberalisation, played in competition in 2008. “As the world totters on the edge of crisis and hope, between a state of panic or a state of growth and change, are we at the end of Greed? One of the leitmotivs running through some excellent films this year deal with the worldwide financial picture. With money and power. From microcosm to macro-economics, films such as Erwin Wagenhofer’s Let’s Make Money inform us of the implications for the developed world and the relationship of the emerging nations in the crisis.” A film that has could be just as timely today... MG

When did you first start coming to IDFA? I met Ally and the IDFA staff at the ‘89 Berlin Film Fest, where they made clear that a new phenomenon was being created in Amsterdam: IDFA! Since then I never lost the IDFA fever.

What do you consider your greatest success at IDFA? The greatest success was the first Docs for Sale that was put together in four weeks! (By Ingrid van Ulden and myself.)

What have been your favourite titles at the festival?

The films made by Fred Wiseman. (In the beginning, Ally always complained that I did not know this guy.)

If IDFA were a wine, what would have been its vintage year for you?

For me, 2007 was a special year, because we started the digital video library in a completely new environment, at the Arti et Amicitiae Society. This was a great step forward in the history of Docs for Sale.

What’s changed most in the doc industry over the past 25 years?

I am surprised that a lot of the first guests at Docs for Sale are still around, and come back every year. I think IDFA has really helped generate broader attention for documentaries, both in the Netherlands and abroad.

Which IDFA events over the past 25 years stand out most, and why?

The first distributors’ party in de Kring on Leidseplein square: the beginning of a great tradition.

How many of your own famous Bitter Balls have you eaten over the years?

I really don’t know, but from the start of Docs for Sale I told the IDFA management we needed one hour per day where makers and buyers could meet and talk; that is how the Happy Hour was born (with the famous Dutch Bitter Balls).

In the sumptuous surroundings of Arti et Amicitiae, maybe we should call them Better Balls! MB

FIRST HAND GOES TRANSMEDIA Zurich and Berlin-based doc sales powerhouse First Hand Films has revealed further details of its slate. One title generating buzz is Kyoko Miyake’s My Atomic Aunt (formerly known as Beyond the Wave). An international coproduction involving the BBC, NHK, SVT and various other broadcasters, this will surface at a festival in early 2013. Meanwhile, First Hand has been doing brisk business on Bergman’s Video, a 6-part series (and related feature doc) exploring the strange and eclectic mix of films legendary Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman kept in his private archive – everything from art house classics to Romancing the Stone and Goldie Hawn comedies. Woody Allen, Nicole Kidman, Michael Haneke, Lars Von Trier, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro all feature. The project has been picked up in its entirety by Pretty Pictures for France. Also sparking interest is feature doc Fonko, about contemporary African urban music. Here in Amsterdam, the company has unveiled its first “transmedia” package. Its new title The Defector: Escape From North Korea will be available to international distributors not just as a film but comes with websites, games and many other interactive bells and whistles.

On a similar note, First Hand is also representing global transmedia project Midlife Mojo, billed as “an emotional and informational transmedia universe designed by and built for women who dare to share their stories.” First Hand is directly involved in the project through its production company Kiss The Frog Films. This will be launched on the web in 2013 and as a feature doc in 2015. A book, a TV series, mobile apps and live events are also planned. It is based around ten stories of ten women in ten countries around the world facing change in their lives. Osnat Trabelsi is the initiator and project director. Geoffrey Macnab IDFA – 3

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SOLIDARITY SUCCEEDS

The Chinese have been out in force at this year’s IDFA, with a 30-strong delegation led by several representatives of state broadcaster CCTV attending the festival. The country’s documentary industry was the focus of two industry panels on Thursday: “Meet the Chinese” and “Dancing with Dragons” on how to tap into the country’s 1.3 billion market. Xiao Wang (with microphone) of Shanghai TV addresses the panel.

Photo: Nadine Maas

PEDAL PUSHER

As cycling fever catches Britain in the wake of British bike success in the Tour De France and the London 2012 Olympics, The Scottish Documentary Institute is backing its own two-wheeled feature doc.

Being David Millar, directed by Finlay Pretsell, is about Scottish cyclist Millar, who has competed many times in the Tour de France and has regularly won stages of the race. The film will be produced by Sonja Henrici. It will follow Miller over the course of one gruelling race while also looking back over his career.

Another new SDI project is Amy Hardie’s Hospice – The Musical.

(Hardie’s earlier feature doc screened at IDFA in 2010.) SDI is also backing 16 Years Till Summer by Lou McLoughlin. Developed from her own short, this is about a man who returns home to a small village in the Scottish highlands and confronts his past after sixteen years in exile.

The Institute has come to IDFA with a rich crop of new Scottish doc fare. I Am Breathing by Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon has been screening in competition. SDI also backed Pablo’s Winter directed by Chico Pereira (nominated in the competition

THE MAIDS

Young Chilean directors Patricia Correa and Valentina MacPherson have had an auspicious start to IDFA with their feature The Women and the Passenger (an international premiere in the mid-length competition). Early during the festival, they secured an international sales agent in the shape of Taskovski Films, who’ve added the movie to their burgeoning slate of LatinAmerican titles. “Taskovski Films came highly recommended from the Chilean delegation”, Mac-Pherson comments. “We really wanted to sign with them.”

The film is set in a “sex motel” where guests come for fleeting sexual encounters. The doc follows daily life in the hotel from the perspective of the maids who spend their days cleaning up after the many seamy trysts that take place on the premises.

Correa and Mac-Pherson were originally hired to make an instructional film for the motel’s owner, whose son Patricia was friendly with. As part of their research, they actually enlisted as maids themselves in the motel. This gave them extraordinary access. “We really took advantage because nobody opens the doors of a hotel to make any kind of video”, Mac-Pherson recalls.

The motel environment, she points out, is “very rough. There’s a lot of prostitution and drugs. It’s not like a gentle place to be. You hear sex all the time. The state the passengers leave the rooms – it’s very dirty! It’s not a nice place to work. We worked

NPO sales chief Kaisa Kriek announced Israeli sales yesterday on Anneloek Sollart’s Rawer to Yes/DBS and Hiv Hiv Hurray (Peter Wingender) to Channel 8. She has also sold Alexander Oey’s Backlight: Made in Germany to Finland (YLE) and Belgium (VRT).

for student documentary). Meanwhile, The Perfect Fit, a short doc directed by Tali Yankelevich, was chosen on the long list for this year’s Documentary Short Oscar.

SDI is the lead body for documentary in the UK but is not, at this stage, a publicly funded organization. Instead, it receives funding for individual projects from government body Creative Scotland. These projects include Bridging the Gap, a doc talent training and development initiative that has now been running for 10 years. In 2007, SDI launched its own production company, SDI Productions, for making feature docs. “My ambition was to create a documentary scene in Scotland. I was very disappointed when I moved to Scotland that people were busy making documentaries for television but were not taking part in a wider documentary conversation”, notes Noe Mendelle, who founded SDI in 2003/4. In the long term, Mendelle hopes that SDI, currently based at Edinburgh College of Art and specialising in documentary training, production and distribution, will become a fully-fledged national body. Geoffrey Macnab

there a couple of months and really felt a bit trapped in the place. You want to breathe and it’s like there is no air. It’s very crazy.” Nonetheless, the maids they filmed still had a tender and romantic idea of what love should be. “We needed the interviews to be very intimate so we became very close to them.

We were co-workers for quite a while.”

The maids were impressed and a little surprised by the direction the directors took in the doc. Now, Correa and Mac-Pherson are planning a new film together. This will be a “phantasmagoric” doc about a small, near deserted town high in the mountains of northern Chile, where only eight people are left. “We want to do a love story again about the women in this place where the people are disappearing. There is nothing there. The schools are abandoned. Everything is like a dead town.” Geoffrey Macnab

The Women and the Passenger

Just three months ago, it looked doubtful whether Syrian producer and pan-Arab DOX BOX film festival founder Orwa Nyrabia would be at IDFA this year after he was detained by military police on spying charges en route from Damascus airport to Cairo.

His detention sparked an international solidarity campaign bringing together the filmmaking community across the world, with festivals such as IDFA, Toronto and Cannes joining the likes of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro in calls for his release. “The campaign had a wonderful impact. I am convinced my captors treated me a little more gently because of the campaign”, says Nyrabia, who was held in a tiny, underground cell with some 70 other prisoners. “When Robert De Niro said ‘Free Orwa’, this had a strange impact on my interrogators. This is the magic of cinema, they probably would not have cared if Obama, Hollande or Cameron had issued a similar message.”

Referring to Scorsese’s call for the international film community to remain vigilant against injustices perpetrated against fellow artists, Nyrabia said: “I think he made a really important point about us filmmakers belonging to a community and the need for us to stand together in cases such as mine… I want to keep reminding people about this for the rest of my life, because it has to be clear that film is not an easy prey.”

Nyrabia was finally released after some 20 days in prison and then left for Egypt at the earliest possible opportunity. Shortly after his departure, he learnt a second warrant had been issued for his arrest. He is now operating his previously Damascusbased production company Proaction Film out of Cairo, alongside wife and business partner Diana El-Jeiroudi. They are also planning a second edition of the DOX BOX global day for March 15, 2013, to mark the second anniversary of Syria’s uprising. The initiative will replace the annual DOX BOX festival, which used to run in Damascus, Tartous and Homs in the first two weeks of March. Melanie Goodfellow Orwa Nyrabia

Photo: Nichon Glerum

STORY AB DISTRIFIES Swedish film and doc-prod company Story AB has partnered Scotland-based VOD service Distrify to launch its own video-on-demand service. This will open up the company catalogue to a worldwide audience, and will include a dozen films re-digitised for this project. Films on offer include The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 (Sundance World Documentary Editing Award and two Guldbagge/Swedish Film Awards); At Night I Fly (winner of the Guldbagge for Best Documentary), and older films such as the Guldbagge-nominated The Stars We Are (1997).

Tobias Janson, Story AB CEO says: “Although the actual production of quality documentaries and fictional films will remain our company’s main objective, we are proud to be a forerunner in providing and collaborating with an easy to use video-on-demand service such as Distrify.”

IDFA – 5

ALL FOR ART

Victor Kossakovsky will do anything for his art – and for IDFA, it seems. A slimmed down version of the Russian director is in Amsterdam this year, having tried to lose 25 kilos in two months for a one-minute film to celebrate the festival’s 25th anniversary, Melanie Goodfellow reports.

“When the festival got in contact asking whether it would be possible to make a oneminute film for its birthday, I thought it would be a novel idea to see me losing 25 kilos over the space of just one minute”, says the director, who reduced his diet to a small bowl of rice each day.

“I started filming myself with my i-Pad, standing naked on the scales every day. I lost 14 kilos, and then I got gastroenteritis and my doctor ordered me to stop”, he recounts. “Perhaps I’ll try losing 26 kilos next year.”

SWIMMING IN LOVE The filmmaker, a regular guest at IDFA since winning best feature-length documentary and audience awards for The Belovs in 1993, is being feted by the festival this year with a retrospective of his work, ranging from the 2005 Syvato, about his young son, to his more recent ¡Vivan las antipodas!

“IDFA is so important for me. The first time I came here I was an unknown, and then I got the Joris Ivens Award and the audience prize – it a big deal for me. I was stopped by the Russian customs. They couldn’t work out what it was”, says Kossakovsky. “My films have won hundreds of prizes elsewhere; but IDFA is the most important festival here.”

“I’m swimming in love here. As I was waiting for my suitcase at the airport, a woman came up to me and said, ‘Victor, I love your films!’

She had nothing to do with the festival. The guy who drove me in said, ‘Victor, I saw your

movie, my wife saw it, my mother saw it, we loved it.’ Then I went to buy falafel and I wanted to pay for it and the guy said, ‘No, no, we love your movies!’ recounts Kossakovsky. “Where else in the world do people go and watch documentaries in the cinema like they do here? What IDFA has done for documentary films is unbelievable. Ally Derks should be given a medal by the city for services to film.”

TRANSITIONS The final film in the Kossakovsky retrospective, the 2000 three-part I Loved You, screens on Friday. The trilogy of mid-length films explores different aspects of love, from that of an elderly couple in Jerusalem to toddler infatuations in the playground of a Russian school. “I made it at the time that filmmaking was going through a translation from 35mm to digital. This was a very painful process for me. For Europeans it was a little easier, because they transitioned from 16mm, which is not such a jump. But to jump from making 35mm films to shooting digitally was a huge change for me”, explains the director. “To fill the gap, I made three films about love in three different formats – 35mm, 16mm and digital, just to make a simple transition. The first part in 35mm was about an old couple, the second in 16mm about a couple in their 20s and the final piece, shot in digital, about very young children”, he continues. “It was not a an easy process for me. When I learned that Sokurov

Victor Kossakovsky

Photo: Bram Belloni

was making Spiritual Voices with a Betacam I was crying. I called him and said to him, I can’t shake your hand. How can you go to digital video from cinema?” he recalls.

In a sign of how Kossakovsky has since embraced the digital age, he included the film in his Top 10. The epic 328-minute picture, about

a detachment of Russian soldiers stationed on the Tajik-Afghan border in 1994-95 to guard against incursions by Taliban fighters, was shown in a five-hour screening on Wednesday.

“I was amazed the festival let me include it, it is so long,” he says. “It could be one of the very last times it ever gets programmed in a cinema.”

The Netherlands Film Festival presents:

It’s All True 2013

18th INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL APRIL 4 - 14, 2013 SÃO PAULO/RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

Deadline for entries: December 10, 2012

Holland Film Meeting The annual get-together of Dutch and foreign film professionals September 26th - 30th 2013, Utrecht Netherlands Production Platform / NFF International Screenings Workshops & panels / Cinema Militans Lecture Binger-Screen International Interview / Digital Film Library

For more information please contact: • Holland Film Meeting +31 30 230 38 00 hfm@filmfestival.nl • Signe Zeilich-Jensen Head of Industry Holland Film Meeting +31 6 129 904 56 Signe@filmfestival.nl

• Willemien van Aalst Festival Director Netherlands Film Festival +31 6 542 078 90 Willemien@filmfestival.nl www.filmfestival.nl/en

www.itsalltrue.com.br info@itsalltrue.com.br HGIS Cultuurmiddelen

6 – IDFA

Binger Filmlab EYE International MEDIA Desk Nederland City of Utrecht Screen International FPN

PABLO’S WINTER Chico Pereira’s Student Competition nominee Pablo’s Winter was born of a desire to “direct real people” the director, who has won several awards for his fiction shorts, tells Mark Baker.

“I like to work with actors”, Pereira says. “But at a certain point, I decided it would be interesting to try to direct non-actors.”

This desire eventually him back to his home town of Almadén in Spain. A somewhat unprepossessing small town, Almadén does happen to have the most productive mercury mine in the world.

At least, it used to have. “The mine closed 15 years ago”, Pereira says. “The mine always attracted a certain amount of media attention – but no one ever paid any attention to the generations of miners who worked there. Pablo is one of the last of these miners, a real dying breed. I wanted to immortalise them in my film.”

“I spent a couple of months in the town, interviewing old miners”, Pereira remembers. “I ended up in Pablo’s house by chance.

I thought, he has an interesting voice. Then I took some black & white photos of him (I knew I wanted to film in black & white) and they looked really good. I also liked his dry sense of humour.

I wanted someone iconic, someone who could represent all the miners, and he has this quality.”

The opening music to Pablo’s Winter (the composer of which also comes from Almadén) has a decidedly Western flavour – a deliberate choice, the director says. “Pablo watches a Western every day”, he explains. “And he’s got this cowboy-like quality.

That strong, silent John Wayne look. And in Westerns, you also often have a ghost town, where there’s nothing happening and tumbleweed blowing about. That’s how Almadén is now.”

Pablo’s Winter is slow-paced and observational, making extensive use of visual metaphors (an old couple toiling up a hill in the

background as Pablo’s wife cleans the windows; fog shrouding the abandoned mine buildings as a vulture circles overhead).

The film takes its time to reveal the gradual, seismic shifts in the ossified layers of Pablo’s personality. But, in line with his ambition, the director did at times gently intervene to get the shots he wanted. “For example, I suggested to Pablo that maybe he could take down the Christmas tree. And I suggested to his wife that she ask him about his doctor’s appointment. Then I just left them to it, leaving the camera running so I could get a couple of minutes in one shot. But the dialogue is all their own.”

“The only thing Pablo refused to do for me was go into the supermarket”, Pereira reveals. “He told me he has never been in

SOUNDBREAKER

Muscular in stature, Finnish Kimmo Pohjonen brings an even greater degree of muscularity to the process of playing the accordion. His maverick life-story is told by a director equally avantgarde in his approach to the craft, Nick Cunningham writes.

In Kimmo Koskela’s film we are told that it took Pohjonen a long time to embrace the accordion. Coming from a family of players, he was something of a teenage prodigy but nevertheless thought of the accordion as “an instrument losers play to please their parents.” He studied classical accordion at the Sibelius Academy but hated the proscriptive rules he was asked to apply to mastering it.

Two events subsequently defined a future musical trajectory characterised by daring and experimentation. He changed musical codes by enrolling in the Academy’s folk department, and then gave it all up (temporarily) to learn primitive thumb piano in Tanzania under his hero, Hukwe Zawosa.

He returned a musician, he claims, and finally discovered a passion both for the accordion and its potential to create extraordinary modernist music through amplification and digital sound manipulation. He also embraced a particular euphemism applied to the instrument. “In Finnish, accordion is a synonym for asshole”, he explains.

While director Kimmo Koskela was making his film, Pohjonen had 12 projects on the go, including the Earth Machine Music Project, in which he records farmyard sounds to accompany a performance before an audience of English farming villagers, and an original avant-garde composition for the renowned Kronos Quartet. We also see his nod to the Finnish tradition of accompanying wrestling

with music in order to drown out the unpleasant bodily sounds emitted among with all the squeezing and rolling.

His music/wrestling/dance installation subsequently played in London during the Summer 2012 Olympics.

“He is constantly creating new projects with different people and artists, from Finland and abroad”, explains director Koskela. “He is a great collaborator. In one way, this film was another one of his projects. I thought I might run into some problems during the production because he is a kind of a control freak. But he let me do my job as a director. Somebody told me we were going to be enemies, but we are still good friends.”

The letter ‘k’ seems to play an emblematic role within Pohjonen’s creative output, having formed groups and ensembles named K Cube, Kluster and KTU. Surely his collaboration with a director named Kimmo Koskela cannot be accidental. “It was 100% coincidence with the Kronos quartet,” laughs the filmmaker. “But I think his interest in the letter started when he found a first project beginning with ‘k’, found it funny and continued with it. He didn’t create the Kronos Quartet, but of course my name was the major reason for allowing me to make the film!”

REFLECTING IMAGES: PANORAMA Soundbreaker – Kimmo Koskela Sat 24/11, 22:00, Munt 13

the supermarket in his life. He always stands outside, smoking, while his wife does the shopping.”

So what did his taciturn protagonist make of the film? “I showed the film in Almadén ahead of the premiere, in my old high school”, Pereira recollects. “Pablo said, ‘I think you portrayed us the way we are.’ I think that is a compliment. I also asked him if he watches films in a different way, now he’s been in one. His answer was, ‘No.’” IDFA COMPETITION FOR STUDENT DOCUMENTARY Pablo’s Winter – Chico Pereira Munt 12, Fri 23/11, 21:30

A HOME FAR AWAY You probably don’t know the name Lois Wheeler, but there was a time – almost 70 years ago – when Wheeler was one of the most sought-after young actresses on Broadway and in Hollywood, writes Geoffrey Macnab.

Then came her marriage to Edgar Snow, the celebrated American journalist and author of Red Star Over China (1937). Snow was the acknowledged expert on the Chinese Communist Party of the 1930s. His fascination with China came back to bite him during the McCarthy era, when he and Wheeler were blacklisted. To escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, the couple eventually decamped to Europe to begin a new life in Switzerland.

Lois, in her 90s when Entell began the film, is the subject of A Home Far Away. Entell, who had known her since the early 1970s, began filming just as she was about to leave the family home she had shared with Snow.

“I knew about the archive footage for 30 years”, Entell says of the extraordinarily rich collection of film and photographs Lois was sifting through as she packed up her possessions. This included the first footage ever shot of future Chinese leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, long before they came to power, when they were still hiding in the mountains.

The Snows were known in China as friends of Mao. Some argue that the Chinese Communist authorities used Edgar Snow as a mouthpiece to communicate a favourable view of the country to the West.

“I didn’t know how to make the film. I had to have some method. Then, when I learned the house was going to be demolished, that gave me the key. It was a very dramatic metaphor for a family forced to move, and for what a home means to us in terms of safety and belonging.”

As Lois took books off shelves and sorted through papers, Entell was there recording. The style of the doc was partially inspired by traditional Chinese painting (in which humans are shown as small figures against the backdrop of much bigger landscapes.) “In Chinese traditional painting, there is always a body of water separating land masses”, the director notes. “This is very key to the film because Snow left America and travelled across the Pacific Ocean to China. The family had to leave America to cross the Atlantic to come to Europe.”

After the premiere of the film in Nyon earlier this year, Lois came on stage to take the applause and answer questions. As Entell notes, she had had to give up her career to accompany Snow to Switzerland. “She had tears in her eyes. For the first time in 60 years, she had a direct response to a performance!”

REFLECTING IMAGES – MASTERS A Home Far Away – Peter Entell Fri 23/11, 11:00, Munt 10

IDFA – 7