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