Ana Ana: exploring women’s
rights in Egypt
Gerrets’ Shado’man in IDFA competition IDFA nod for Godot-inspired
Ne me quitte pas
EYE embraces IDFA with two programmes
Cream of new doc producers
in IDFA
A publication by the Netherlands Film Fund and EYE International
Issue #13 November 2013 IDFA issue Download the free app for iPad and Android 1
Index
View from The Edge
2 View from the Edge
experience, are very capable of this.
Luciano Barisone, Director of Visions du Réel Festival International de Cinéma, Switzerland
When I am programming for Visions du Réel, the most recent Dutch documentary output is one of the first things I take into consideration, and every year we have three or four films from the Netherlands, which is remarkable given that our whole inter national programme totals around 110 films.
8-9 Waiting for...
Beckett-inspired Ne me quitte pas has been selected for IDFA competition. Filmmakers Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden talk to See NL
10-11 Norway and Holland join forces See NL examines Dutch/Norwegian desire to co-produce docs together
12-13 In the Shadows
Boris Gerrets returned to Sierra Leone to make Shado’man, a film about the capital’s streetboys, and now the film is in IDFA competition. See NL talks to the director
14-15 Cover feature
In Ana Ana Corinne van Egeraat and Petr Lom tap into Cairo’s vibrant artist community to explore the issue of women’s rights in revolutionary Egypt. See NL reports
16-17 Crossing Continents
Borders follows the treacherous journey made by tens of thousands of West Africans hoping to make it into Europe each year. See NL talks to director Jacqueline van Vugt
18-19 IDFA reaches out
At IDFA filmmakers can attend a tailor-made workshop designed to connect social issue films with audiences
20-21 EYE on IDFA
EYE is hosting two major IDFA programmes in 2013, a focus on World War One and an examination on how doc and fiction filmmakers approach their craft, using the same source material. See NL reports
22-23 Six of the Best
The cream of the Netherlands’ new documentary producers talk to See NL about their craft and international outlook
24-25 Short Cuts
News from the Dutch film industry
26-27 Kaisa Chief
See NL talks to NPO Sales’ Kaisa Kriek
28-31 An overview
of Dutch films in IDFA selection
Luciano Barisone, Director of Visions du Réel Festival International de Cinéma, Switzerland
There are some Dutch film makers that are of classical and historical importance, such as Joris Ivens and Johan van der Keuken. Looking at the contem porary Dutch scene, Heddy Honigmann is a wonderful filmmaker. I love her films, as I do those of John Appel and Leonard Retel Helmrich, and Boris Gerrets, whose Shado’man (in IDFA 2013 Competition) is a wonderful example of the type of documentary I like - a strong story told in a very cinematic way.
Since the 1970s I have been to many international festivals such as Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes and Venice, firstly as a critic, now as a festival director, watching all kinds of films. Over this period, what has always struck me about Dutch production is how the country’s documentaries are generally much stronger than its fiction films.
Over the past years, I have seen and admired films by Dutch documentary makers such as Aliona van der Horst, Marc Schmidt and Jessica Gorter. Our mission at the festival is to uncover more and more new talents, and the Dutch docu mentary industry continues to supply them.
In the Netherlands there are some similarities to the situation we have in Switzerland. Firstly, broadcasters are interested in putting money into documentary production. In addition, there are more theatrical releases of documentaries, and there is a greater interest on the part of artistic institutions and funds to invest.
Why are the Dutch so good at making documentaries? They are travellers and merchants, and as their country is small they are interested in looking at life beyond their borders. Equally, in Amsterdam and Rotterdam the first impression you get is that it is a melting pot, both ethnically and linguistically, with a composite structure that encourages its filmmakers to look outwards and find stories in other countries around the world.
But what interests me most about Dutch documentary filmmakers is the great variety of styles and forms within their films, not just the subject or content. For me, it is essential that documentary filmmaking remains highly cinematic – not just informative. The strength of the film’s subject can be revealed in the way the film is formed cinematically. If the filmmaker can capture this unique form then he or she has succeeded, and the Dutch, in my
Cover still: Ana Ana Director: Corinne van Egeraat, Petr Lom Production: ZINdoc, co-produced by LomFilms, Daydream Productions. Sales: NPO Sales
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This kind of curiosity is rare, and there are many countries that are focused just on themselves. If you look at US documentary production, most directors are making films just about the US. If they make a film about, for example, Iran or Iraq then it is really about how that situation impacts upon their own country. In the main, these directors will not go out and make a film about a non-commercial subject - but a Dutch filmmaker will, because it is probably a story worth telling, and the project will invariably be driven by an inherent sense of curiosity.
Colophon See NL is published four times per year by EYE International and The Netherlands Film Fund and is distributed to international film professionals. Editors in chief: Claudia Landsberger (EYE), Jonathan Mees (Netherlands Film Fund) Executive editor: Nick Cunningham Contributors: Geoffrey Macnab, Melanie Goodfellow and Luciano Barisone Concept & Design: Lava.nl, Amsterdam Layout: def., Amsterdam Printing: Roto Smeets Grafiservices Printed on FSC paper Circulation: 3500 copies © All rights reserved: The Netherlands Film Fund and EYE International 2013 Contact Sandra den Hamer CEO EYE E sandradenhamer@eyefilm.nl Claudia Landsberger Head of EYE international E claudialandsberger@eyefilm.nl EYE International PO BOX 74782 1070 BT Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 589 1400 W www.eyefilm.nl Doreen Boonekamp CEO Netherlands Film Fund E d.boonekamp@filmfonds.nl Frank Peijnenburg Head of Screen NL Netherlands Film Fund E f.peijnenburg@filmfonds.nl Dany Delvoie International Affairs Netherlands Film Fund E d.delvoie@filmfund.nl
Shado’man
Pieter Fleury Documentary Film Consultant Netherlands Film Fund E p.fleury@filmfonds.nl
‘I saw all these people who were disabled. I thought this is huge. The amount of people living on the street and that are disabled was so striking.’
Jonathan Mees Head of Communications Netherlands Film Fund E j.mees@filmfonds.nl Netherlands Film Fund Pijnackerstraat 5 1072 JS Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 570 7676 W www.filmfonds.nl
See page 12-13
Shado’man Director: Boris Gerrets Production: Pieter van Huystee Film, in co-production with Les Films d’Ici (FA), Pippaciné (NL/UK) Sales: Pieter van Huystee Film/Public Film See page 12-13 3
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Ne me quitte pas While Marcel was generally the life and soul of the party, Bob was somewhat vain and capricious, with a tendency towards mistrust. See page 8
Ne me quitte pas Director: Sabine Lubbe Bakker, Niels van Koevorden Production: Pieter van Huystee Film, in co-production with Storyhouse Film (BE) and Studio Godot Sales: Pieter van Huystee Film/Public Film 5
Ana Ana ‘Combining self-shot videos and images captured by the filmmakers, this timely documentary builds up an intimate portrait of four young and feisty women as they struggle with their own inner demons.’ See page 14
Ana Ana Director: Corinne van Egeraat, Petr Lom Production: ZINdoc, co-produced by LomFilms, Daydream Productions. Sales: NPO Sales
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Borders ‘Black is beautiful,’ they replied. ‘Then how come you’re the one who is still asking the questions?’ See page 16 Borders Director: Jacqueline van Vugt Production: Pieter van Huystee Film Sales: NPO Sales
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IDFA Competition
Waiting for... Directors Niels van Koevorden and Sabine Lubbe Bakker are obviously devotees of Beckett, writes Nick Cunningham. Their company is called Studio Godot and their IDFA competition film Ne me quitte pas is prefaced with a quote from the Irish playwright’s most celebrated work (“It is not every day that we are needed,” we read) before the film embarks upon a melancholy and at times absurdist study of a touching friendship, a la Waiting for Godot itself.
Niels van Koevorden en Sabine Lubbe Bakker
But unlike Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, we are all too aware of Bob and Marcel’s respective backstories - and what compels them to booze to the extent that they do. Marcel’s marriage has failed and his kids are a perennial reminder of his loss. Bob is a lone (albeit Flemish) cowboy with an alcoholic dependency, and a son with whom he has a very strained relationship. Together Marcel and Bob talk and drink and smoke and fall over - and then proceed to look after each other when life’s woes become unbearable. That said, Ne me quitte pas is not without humour and charm, and it displays a degree of absurdism that may satisfy the master Beckett himself. After a bone-
shattering, alcohol-induced fall Marcel is brought round when Bob pours (close to) boiling water over his head. And in a scene all too reminiscent of Godot Bob leads us to his mythical and inspiring tree in the forest where he can contemplate the world, only to discover that it has been cut down. Either that, or he can simply no longer find it.
sometimes a fight we would have with him.” “He realised that if we wanted to edit it in a certain way we could portray him as a real alcoholic so sometimes he wanted to control the situation,” Van Koevorden continues. “He was, like, I want to read the script. He wanted to be involved with funding, with producers, and we just said that’s very hard – you just have to be you.”
“When we met them we were very much charmed by them,” comments co-director Lubbe Bakker of the friendship that she and feature debutant Van Koevorden chronicled. “We had a lot of fun, and we thought these guys were crazy. But also the way their relationship works, how they help each other - it was a friendship of mutual dependency and it was a little bit interesting. But we were also a little bit worried because [the film] could have been too much about drinking. But we were just drawn to them. Actually we couldn’t stay away from them.”
‘We were very much charmed by them...’ The film follows Marcel to a rehab hospital to cure his alcohol dependency, and charts Bob’s physical decline after a car accident. Shot over two years the ravages of time become clearly etched on the face of each. Freshfaced and clear-skinned at the beginning of the film, Marcel is bloated and grey by the film’s end.
The directors concede that while Marcel was generally the life and soul of the party, rendering the filmmakers helpless with laughter as they got to know him over many alcohol-fuelled evenings, Bob was somewhat vain and capricious, with a tendency towards mistrust. “Marcel is very easy. He has this natural gift... he is very good with timing... he is just very funny. The guy is a born entertainer. If he would sober up, he would be the best comedian in Belgium,” Van Koevorden underlines.
Bob and Marcel have seen the film and are delighted with the results. “It was a very emotional screening. They thought it was very funny. They liked their own jokes a lot. But I think that the moment saw Marcel saw his kids leave before he went to hospital, he was really crying. I could see the tears rolling down his face,” comments Lubbe Bakker. “I also really like Bob’s reaction,” adds Van Koevorden. “It’s never nice if your characters don’t like the films that you have made about them, and I think he was very nervous to see it - he did his very best to stay sober as long as possible so that he could really get what we did. Afterwards he
“But Bob wanted to be more of a maker than a main character,” Lubbe Bakker responds. “That was because he has many theories about life, many of which are funny and cool, [but] he wanted to be more in control, so this was
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was really happy, he was very much touched, and he said ‘yes, you can see that I drink too much, that I smoke too much, but you can also see that I am trying to help Marcel, like you can also see that it is not going very well with my son, but at least you also show that I put an effort into it’. He sees it also as his legacy for his children and his grandchildren.” A key part of a film’s career is its eventual festival roll-out, and Lubbe Bakker and Van Koevorden see no reason why their subjects should be denied the privilege of being part of this process. “Yes, they will be at the world premiere,” Lubbe Bakker confirms. “We will first of all take them to a sauna or some kind of public bath, and then we will rent suits for them, give them a haircut and they will be the rising stars of the festival.”
Ne me quitte pas Director: Sabine Lubbe Bakker, Niels van Koevorden Production: Pieter van Huystee Film, in co-production with Storyhouse Film (BE) and Studio Godot Sales: Pieter van Huystee Film/Public Film 9
Co-production focus
Norwegian Dutch Docs IDFA marks the beginning of a new co-production agreement between the Netherlands Film Fund and Norwegian Film Institute that will yield six new feature docs between 2014 and 2016, reports Geoffrey Macnab.
the Netherlands Film Fund. “We were approached by the Norwegians. They had this initiative and I thought imme diately it would be very good,” Fleury notes. “It matched our strategy of seeking opportunities for international co-production.”
There will be three majority Dutch docs and three majority Norwegian. The aim is to ensure that all the films are seen in both countries. Both countries are investing €150,000 in the scheme.
The Dutch see the alliance as a natural continuation of the ongoing collaboration between Dutch filmmakers and their Scandinavian counterparts. Leading Dutch producers welcome the initiative although some ask - “why do they need us?” After all, the Scandinavians have a strong tradition of government and broadcaster support for the arts (including documentary) and already have strong ties with each other.
“We consider the Netherlands as being one of the leading countries worldwide in both producing and promoting documentary films,” Bjørn Arne Odden, Senior Advisor Production at the Norwegian Film Institute, declares of the agreement. For the Norwegians, the collaboration isn’t just about making the films themselves. They hope to tap into the Dutch documentary network - and to take advantage of events like IDFA, generally acknowledged as Europe’s most important documentary festival. “There is already quite a strong connection between Norwegian and Dutch documentary makers,” suggests Nina Refseth, outgoing MD of the Norwegian Film Institute. “The Dutch and Norwegian mentality is quite compatible. They (filmmakers from the two countries) tend to understand where projects are heading, what context they evolve in, and how they explain society. Both countries tend to use English quite well and know that you won’t find anyone (else) to speak Dutch or Norwegian!” The Norwegians’ enthusiasm is echoed by that of Pieter Fleury, Documentary Film Consultant at
so much overlap yet - but this is something both us and the Netherlands Film Fund are working to remedy!” Nina Refseth highlights the importance of ensuring that quality levels are high. That’s one reason why the collaboration will extend only to six films over the first two years. “We just want to see where this takes us.” If the scheme works, the Norwegians and Dutch are also exploring the possibility of a similar collabo ration on kids’ movies - another area in which both countries excel. Niek Koppen of Amsterdam-based Selfmade Films points to the success of the documentary partnership between the Netherlands Film Fund and the Flemish Audiovisual Fund (VAF). This is structured along near identical lines to the new alliance with Norway. “It works great,” he stresses. “Producers (from both countries) really got to know each other. There were lots of interesting projects from the Flemish. They were happy with us because we have more experience in feature length documentary than they do. I think it worked out very well.” The hope now is that the collaboration with Norway will yield similar results.
The Norwegians, though, talk of their desire to create new partnerships beyond Scandinavia. There are cultural as well as economic reasons for extending their reach beyond Nordic borders. “Scandinavia is historically tightly knit together and producers co-produce among themselves, so we want to reach out to a bigger market and open up Norway and Scandinavia to the rest of Europe,” says Odden. He adds that the Netherlands is “similar” to Norway in many ways. These are two smallish countries with enterprising, open-minded, outward-looking populations. It helps, too, that the new Nether lands Film Fund selection system is largely inspired by the Scandinavian model.
Koppen already has strong ties to Scandinavia. Earlier this year, he pitched a new project, Alex Pitstra’s Bezness As Usual, at the Forum of the Nordisk Panorama in Malmö, Sweden. He was part of a delegation of eight Dutch producers at the event. “We are very much alike. I am absolutely convinced about that,” Koppen says.
Odden acknowledges that the two countries’ documentary makers are still in the early stages of their courtship. There hasn’t been much previous collaboration between them. “We are still at the point where we are getting to know each other, so there is not
Trueworks’ Reinette van de Stadt-Ho, set to become the Dutch minority co-producer on Norwegian feature doc The
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Accidental Rock Star, adds: “The material benefit will be that there is money allocated for three docs a year from both sides, so this is an express highway that you can use, which makes life less difficult for us. We will be really focussed on Norway and will inspire us to do more in that country.” There are some wrinkles which will need to be ironed out when the Dutch and Norwegians begin to co-produce docs together. “Currency is always an issue in co-productions, but it’s hard to get around that,” notes Odden. “Producers need to be aware of the fact and take the necessary precautions to compensate for fluctuations in the currencies, and our experience is that they usually do.” The necessity for co-production - and for striking new alliances like the one between the Dutch and the Norwegians - is selfevident. At a time of severe cutbacks in public funding, it makes sense for filmmakers across Europe to come together. Odden raises the possibility that the Norwegians may strike similar deals with other potential co-producing partners. “That is definitely something we are looking at for the future, cooperations throughout Europe should be on everyone’s agenda I would say.” Film Fund CEO Doreen Boonekamp adds: “We stimulate filmmakers from both countries to seek theatrical release of their films. The Netherlands Film Fund has recently modified its regulations to enable this. Their effort is required to reach maximum audiences theatrically, on tv and beyond.”
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Shado’man Director: Boris Gerrets Production: Pieter van Huystee Film, in co-production with Les Films d’Ici (FA), Pippaciné (NL/UK) Sales: Pieter van Huystee Film/Public Film 12
IDFA Competition
In the Shadows The opening images of Boris Gerrets’ Shado’man are truly startling, reports Geoffrey Macnab. It’s night-time and a small, silent army of disabled people on crutches and wheelchairs are edging slowly toward the camera.
Boris Gerrets Photo: Miquel Bueno
The film was shot in Freetown, Sierra Leone, a city full of vagrants living rough and marginal lives. These are the characters that Gerrets foregrounds. The director’s connection with Sierra Leone stretches back to the 1960s when his family lived there. His mother was married to the German ambassador. For three or four years, Gerrets spent his summers in Freetown. He was fascinated by everything he saw and relished the contrast between Africa and Europe, where he was in boarding school. That, though, was a long time ago. When Gerrets finally returned to Sierra Leone, he encountered a country still badly scarred by the civil wars that lasted from 1989 to 1996 and then between 1999 and 2003. The countries infrastructure was crumbling. The electricity was far from reliable. The big building and development projects he remembered from his adolescence had been left to rot. He knew nobody.
“It was very difficult for me to get an entry point. Mostly what you see at night are people that are disfavoured in some way,” Gerrets recalls of his early encounters with the Freetown streetboys. “I saw all these people who were disabled. I thought this is huge. The amount of people living on the street and that are disabled was so striking.” The director struck up a rapport with one of them, Suley, and then gradually won the trust of the others. Gerrets has no embarrass ment about the fact that he paid his subjects. “Of course I gave them money.” That, he suggests, is the only ethical course of action. “You’re in a world that is extremely poor - extremely poor. You’re going to make a film and not have them somehow partici pate? I find that a problem.” He told his subjects that “we are a team and we are making this film together.”
was based around chance encounters.
how someone was injured or what exactly happened to them.”
Gerrets is not an overtly polemical director - but that’s not to say his work lacks a sense of social and political engagement. It has always been his belief that by concentrating on the personal and treating people as equals, he can engage the spectator far more effectively in a reflection on social deprivation.
Shado’man is in a very different register to People I Could Have Been And Maybe Am but Gerrets still sees them as companion pieces. Both stemmed from chance encounters. “They are related even though they are stylistically different. They come from the same obsession,” Gerrets muses. “I could have stepped out of the car somewhere else. It was almost already clear that I was going to make the film before I met the people I met.”
Nor does he ever portray his subjects simply as victims. His approach is far more subjective and personal. Voice-over and contextualisation is kept to a minimum. In Shado’man, we are plunged into the heart of night-time Freetown. “I do not do re-enactments... I use the camera as a catalyst to create a social situation,” the director states. In describing Shado’man, Gerrets frequently cites writers like Dante and Samuel Beckett. He points to the absurdist quality of the world the streetboys inhabit.
The initial idea was to make a film of the streetboys’ journey through the night. During the shoot, “the dynamics of life” took over and the doc, which was made over a period of two and a half years, was pulled in different directions.
‘I use the camera as a catalyst...’
Shado’man was daunting to shoot. The bad light made filming a constant struggle. Gerrets had a skeleton crew comprising of himself, his daughter Rosalie and the assistants they managed to pick up on the streets. They had two lights and sometimes a car or motorbike. “It wouldn’t have been appropriate to have come in with more people. It would just have destroyed the situation.”
“Beckett is not preoccupied with the idea of biography and psychology but he sees the figures in his plays as energies or states of consciousness,” Gerrets reflects on the existential undertow to his documentary. “They transmit his ideas through the roles they play. There is obviously a slight difference in terms of my films. We’re not dealing with playing roles. But there is something about those characters that interests me. They are already so transparent in their being that it doesn’t bring any extra value to the story to know
The documentary was made through Pieter van Huystee Film, which also produced Gerrets’ last film People I Could Have Been And Maybe Am (2010) which he shot in London on a mobile phone, and
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Shado’man is world-premiering in IDFA competition. Amsterdam is also where Gerrets’ previous film was launched. “I feel that IDFA has an enormous amount of films shown that are very issue-driven. I feel that my approach is more cinematic. I hope a film like this that is more poetic, more trying to understand a microcosm of people, doesn’t disappear.” What next? Gerrets sees Shado’man as the middle part of a trilogy, the next part to be set in France. It will look at the extreme contrasts between wealth and poverty and between the lives of citizens and refugees in a country whose identity is still defined by the French Revolution’s clarion call for liberty, equality and fraternity, the director underlines.
Ana Ana Director: Corinne van Egeraat, Petr Lom Production: ZINdoc, co-produced by LomFilms, Daydream Productions. Sales: NPO Sales
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IDFA Dutch Competition
Cairo Dreams Corinne van Egeraat and Petr Lom tap into Cairo’s vibrant artist community to explore the issue of women’s rights in revolutionary Egypt. Melanie Goodfellow reports.
Petr Lom and Corinne van Egeraat
Dutch experimental filmmaker Corinne van Egeraat and Czech-Canadian documentary director Petr Lom’s joint documentary Ana Ana (I Am Me) captures four female Egyptian artists as they talk about both their creativity and what it means to be female and an artist in Egypt today. Women may have been at the forefront of the popular protests that helped topple Egypt’s post-revolution President Mursi and his regressive policies over the summer, but they have yet to achieve true emancipation amid a backdrop of entrenched inequality and rampant sexual harassment. Combining self-shot videos and images captured by the filmmakers, this timely documentary builds up an intimate portrait of four young and feisty women as they struggle with their own inner demons, and society as a whole, in order to express themselves creatively. Fleeting images of Cairo mesh with desert vistas as the women discuss their creative bent against
a haunting soundtrack by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Some six months into the project, the couple decided to extend the initiative into a feature-length work, focusing on some of the women in the group and the issue of women’s rights. "Women’s rights are for us one of the most important issues in Egypt. The revolution promised to improve the status of women, but has done precious little. Petr had also learned, through his own film, how precarious the situation of women is in Egypt,” says Van Egeraat.
“I am not the way I look, or the place I am at... When I shoot I feel like I brush the dust off my soul,” declares the veiled and demurelooking Wafaa Samir, a talented young photographer and artist with an exciting portfolio of conceptual shots capturing modern-day Egypt. Ana Ana grew out of an auto biographical video workshop and installation, entitled The Self-Portrait Video Project, which Van Egeraat ran at Cairo’s The Townhouse Gallery – a contemporary arts centre situated in the city’s downtown car mechanics district – in 2011.
They selected four participants – photographer Samir, avant-garde artist Sarah Ibrahim, theatre director Sondos Shabayek and filmmaker Nadine Salib. “They were already making their own autobiographical stories about themselves – they would come up with metaphors or ways of telling stories which we would then elaborate on,” says Van Egeraat.
The filmmaker had accompanied Lom, who is also her partner, to Egypt while he made his critically acclaimed documentary Back to the Square exploring human rights abuses in the immediate aftermath of President Hosni Mubarak’s ousting in February of that year.
“It was a spontaneous process of being inspired by them and collaborating with them,” comments Lom, who did much of the extra shooting. “What I like about working with Corinne is that she creates ways to get close to the characters. She has a way of collaborating with the participants, mentoring them to film themselves and providing them a stage to reveal the depths of their identities.”
“I’d done a lot of work involving autobiographical filmmaking and decided I wanted to do some coaching in some of the methods I had developed,” says Van Egeraat who, prior to heading to Egypt, made the documentary blog Dislocated, featuring daily posts about how she was coming to terms with leaving a former life behind.
Most of the documentary is set against the backdrop of Cairo’s teeming streets and crowded apartment blocks, but a part of the project saw Van Egeraat and Lom taking the women to the Fayoum Art Centre in a desert oasis two hours out of Cairo.
“The Townhouse was immediately enthusiastic about my proposal and we put a call out on Facebook. We had an overwhelming response and ended up selecting 20 artists – 10 women and 10 men,” says Van Egeraat.
“I thought it would be good to bring in another setting. Cairo is great but it’s always noisy. In the film, the girls are always
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dreaming, they have this dream universe in their heads and I thought it would be nice to give it a location... it was an organic move which came about while we were making the film,” says Van Egeraat. Ana Ana will premiere in the IDFA Competition for Dutch Documentary this year. Both filmmakers are regulars at the festival – Van Egeraat was last at the festival with Bridging the Gap (2008) and Lom with On a Tightrope (2006), and before that Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan (2004). The documentary is due to go on general release in the Netherlands in March 2014 to mark International Women’s Day. Van Egeraat hopes the work will give a deeper insight into the challenges facing women in Egypt. “I hope this film is more personal and gets behind the façade presented by the media,” she says. Van Egeraat and Lom are hoping to transpose the same film making process to Burma in December, where they will be running a video self-portrait workshop as guests of the Human Rights Human Dignity Film Festival. “The organisers of the festival heard about our work and were very interested in the project. Just as in Egypt, we’re hoping to tap into the artist community and hopefully include poets and writers this time too,” says Lom. “It’s an important time for Burma as they prepare for parliamentary and presidential elections next year,” adds Van Egeraat. “By tapping into the artist community we hope we can give another dimension to a serious story.”
IDFA Dutch Competition
Crossing Continents Jacqueline van Vugt’s latest film follows the treacherous journey made by tens of thousands of West Africans hoping to make it into Europe each year. Melanie Goodfellow reports. “What did I do wrong? I am not a bad person,” asks a smartly dressed Ghanaian woman in fluent Dutch as she awaits expulsion from the Netherlands in one of the final scenes of Jacqueline van Vugt’s documentary Borders. The film travels along the route of illegal West African immigrants into Holland. She is one of a dozen people Van Vugt’s camera homes in on as the 5,000-kilometre journey is charted, capturing border-posts in Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Morocco, Spain, Northern France and finally an immigrant detention centre at Rotterdam Airport. “It took us a year and a half to get permission to shoot in the detention centre,” says director Van Vugt, who also lensed the film. “We were repeatedly told there were no African women in these centres.” Van Vugt suggests that the reluctance to give her access was politically motivated, noting that the situation opened up after the right-wing PVV party withdrew from Mark Rutte’s centre-right coalition government. “The day the coalition fell, I got an email from one of the people working at the centre saying there were five African women among the detainees,” she recalls. Borders will premiere in the IDFA 2013 Competition for Dutch Documentary. Van Vugt was last at the festival with Bambara Blues
in 2007, which followed a Mali health-worker as she tried to educate the residents of a mining town on the border about HIV/ Aids prevention. Borders was partly inspired by that film.
what you know. I’d done a lot of research into the border along Gaza but he was right - it was too much,” says Van Vugt, who is now working on an immigrationthemed fiction film provisionally entitled Sweat, revolving around a ferry crossing between Morocco and Spain during which a Dutch family lose their son. Van Vugt is also negotiating to accompany Dutch troops to Mali as an embedded filmmaker.
“During the Bambara shoot, we interviewed a group of Nigerian prostitutes. They used facewhitening cream. We told them to stop because it contained chemicals that would damage their skin saying, besides that, that black is beautiful. ‘Black is beautiful,’ they replied. ‘Then how come you’re the one who is still asking the questions?’ recalls Van Vugt of their response.
‘We were constantly followed by the secret police’
“These conversations got me thinking... about how as a white person, I had so many more chances in life than a black African,” says Van Vugt, who spent her childhood in Mali. There, her father set up the Office du Niger, an agency that administers an irrigation system in the Segou Region of the country. “Another reason for making this film is that in the past decade the Netherlands has become a lot more insular, less open to the world, which annoys me. There is very little of the ‘citizen of the world’ spirit of Erasmus left,” says Van Vugt referring to the Holland’s famous 15th century philosopher who travelled tirelessly in pursuit of knowledge.
The film took Van Vugt the best part of four years to make – two years to find the finance and another two years to shoot. “We shot it in chunks - three weeks at a time. I am a cinematographer, so I did the shooting, travelling with a soundman. I think because I am small, people don’t perceive me as a threat. We would dig in and wait to capture the ‘moment’. We didn’t know what to expect at each border, we just wanted to capture that sense of ‘being there’ that Richard Leacock talks about,” says Van Vugt, referring to documentary maker D.A. Pennebaker’s late cinematographer.
Van Vugt originally wanted to make a documentary encompassing a number of infamous borders around the world – from the Gaza-Israel border to that between Mexico and the United States. Producer Pieter van Huystee, however, convinced Van Vugt to focus on West Africa, tracing the route of immigrants to the Netherlands. “He said to just concentrate on
A major challenge was setting up shooting authorisations on each of the borders. “In each territory we had to talk to the Interior Ministry and the Justice Ministry... At a certain point we were refused permission to shoot on the Nigerian border so we went back to the capital Abuja to sort it out. In the meantime there were a series of bombing attacks by the Boko Haram... so as I was
getting my permissions through I was also being told by the Dutch embassy to get out,” recalls the filmmaker. “Morocco was also very difficult. We were constantly followed by the secret police. It was hard to shake them. At six o’clock in the morning they would be waiting for us at the hotel,” she says. In spite of the surveillance, Van Vugt managed to connect with a group of Nigerian women, forced to work as prostitutes by compatriot pimps in a makeshift camp in a wood. One explains how she and her mother had paid $5,000 to a trafficker on the understanding he would take her to Europe. “It might have taken me a long time to make the film but the journeys these people make are also very, very long. Most of the people who attempt to get to Europe don’t make it but they can’t go back home either," says Van Vugt. “The Nigerian girls stuck in Morocco will never get out. Once a woman steps out of family life, over the border and into prostitution, her life has taken another turn... she can never go back."
Borders Director: Jacqueline van Vugt Production: Pieter van Huystee Film Sales: NPO Sales
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Jacqueline van Vugt and soundman Bouwe Mulder on set
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Industry analysis
Helping docs reach out This year IDFA is offering a tailor-made workshop to explore new ways of connecting social issue films with like-minded audiences. Melanie Goodfellow investigates.
Emily Verellen
Outreach campaigns connecting social issue films with the audiences affected by the topics they explore through social media, community events and targeted screenings are increasingly popular in the US, but less so elsewhere in the world. IDFA will be exploring this practice with a new outreach workshop during this year’s edition. The festival’s industry office has joined forces on the initiative with social activist body The Bertha Foundation, sponsor of the IDFA Bertha Fund, and the private US-based The Fledgling Fund, aimed at films that can reap social change. “There are more and more outreach initiatives in the US and also the UK but very few such campaigns in mainland Europe or elsewhere in the world,” says IDFA industry chief Adriek van Nieuwenhuyzen. “We’ve been talking to The Fledgling Fund for a while now and came up with the idea of a small-scale workshop.”
The films selected for the workshop will be drawn mainly from projects supported by the IDFA Bertha Fund aimed at documentary makers in developing countries. “There are so many great films out there that can be used as tools in strategic ways and have a real impact,” says Rebecca Litchenfeld, director of the Bertha Foundation’s social impact media operations.
who wouldn’t normally watch an art-house film like this.” One of the cancer sufferers in the film, a mother with two young children, has mustered a coach load of supporters from her hometown in the eastern Netherlands for the IDFA premiere and is promoting the work on her Facebook page, Lataster explains. The filmmakers are also hoping to connect with women’s and cancer support groups for a series of special screenings.
The Bertha Foundation was one of the first bodies to get involved in outreach within Europe through its joint UK initiative the Bertha BRITDOC Connect Fund, which has meted out grants and outreach expertise to a dozen films since its creation earlier this year.
In addition Hungarian director Eszter Hajdu will participate with her timely Judgement in Hungary, following the trial of three men who murdered Roma children and adults in a series of violent race-hate crimes, which will premiere in the IDFA Competition for First Appearance.
Three IDFA Bertha Fund-backed projects are among the selected films: Egyptian Nadine Salib’s Mother of the Unborn, Kenyan Peter Murimi’s Lele United and Indian Chandrasekhar Reddy’s Fireflies in the Abyss. Petra and Peter’s Lataster’s IDFA Dutch Documentary Competition contender Awake in a Bad Dream, charting the impact of breast cancer on three women and their families, has also been selected.
The Fledgling Fund’s director of programmes and communications Emily Verellen will lead the workshop with the support of Litchenfeld. “Outreach campaigns are about reaching the people who are most touched by the issues in a film. It’s not about achieving millions of eyeballs but rather connecting with a very targeted audience and getting them to engage and act on the issues in a movie,” explains Verellen. “It goes beyond crowd building to how to get the crowd to take action.”
Dutch Peter Lataster and his German-born wife Petra hope the workshop will give them some pointers on how to reach women and relatives whose lives have been affected by breast cancer. The pair made the film to raise awareness of what it means to live with the illness.
“There’s a lot of programming around this concept in the US and now it’s starting to spread globally too. It’s not enough to make a social issue film, put it out in the world and then expect it to prompt change. There has to be a strategy to make sure the film doesn’t end up collecting dust on the shelf,” she adds. Launched in 2005, the Fledgling
“Everyone knows about breast cancer but very few people understand what it means to live with the illness and how it can affect the whole family,” says Lataster. “We’re already seeing evidence of the film sparking interest from groups of people
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Fund has supported 276 creative media projects to date. “We focus on films that we think will achieve social change and our sweet spot is outreach campaigns,” says Verellen. Recent documentaries supported by The Fledgling Fund include Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War, investigating the high incidence of sexual abuse in the US military. This project was also supported by the Bertha BRITDOC Connect Fund. “Nobody knew about the extent of the problem, the film totally blew the lid off the issue and there’s a campaign to change the way sex crimes are dealt with in the military, to take out the chain of command and get the criminal justice system involved,” Verellen continues. “We connected with the film three to four months before it premiered at Sundance and we were immediately blown away by it. We provided funding and strategy support to help them come-up with the right campaign.” Dana Nachman and Don Hardy’s The Human Experiment, which screens in IDFA Panorama, has also received Fledgling Fund support. The film examines how thousands of potentially health-threatening chemicals are in everyday household products and foodstuffs. “The makers want people to take consumer action and stop buying products that are hurting them,” says Verellen. The IDFA workshop will revolve around a seminar on the basic components of setting up an outreach campaign and a group brainstorming for each project, followed by a one-on-one session with Verellen and Litchenfeld.
Outreach campaigns connect social issue films
through social media, community events and targeted screenings
with the audiences affected by the topics
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Programme analysis
EYE on IDFA Amsterdam’s EYE will host two major programmes during IDFA 2013. Nick Cunningham reports. With 2014 marking the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War One, IDFA and EYE have this year collaborated on a programme of five sessions containing 20 documentaries that were shot mainly between 1914-18 within the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and the UK. The two institutions have also worked together to create a programme called Based on the Same Story, whereby seven documentaries and seven feature films, each pair sharing the same source material, will be screened, examined and discussed. Examples include the documentary One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald) which will be screened alongside Steven Spielberg’s fiction film Munich. Both films document the 1974 Olympic hostage tragedy. EYE’s Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi explains the twofold exposure of Dutch archive material during the The First World War: The First War on Screen programme. The 2.5 hour Dutch documentary Holland Neutraal, de leger – en vlootfilm (1917) is a propaganda film commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of War which served both to underline the country’s neutrality and also to reassure citizens as to the military’s ability to mobilize if necessary. “It is a bit of an oddity in terms of what it shows,” Rongen-Kaynakçi stresses. “As it is doesn’t have a clear narrative line and tries to persuade the audience by showing as many images as possible, it is not what modern audiences are used to seeing, and therefore seemingly out of
context. But within this specific context it is very relevant.”
compare and contrast Greg Barker’s Manhunt (2013) with the fiction film Zero Dark Thirty (2012), both of which chronicle the CIA’s hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
During IDFA Rongen-Kaynakçi will also provide a sneak preview of the ‘European Film Gateway 1914’ website project (EFG1914. eu), which brings together 21 European archives and over 650 hours of WWI related material. EYE is providing more than 100 hours of footage, second only in volume to the UK’s Imperial War Museum (200+ hours). She will present not only military footage, but images depicting daily life within various cities like the Estonian Tartu, Amsterdam, St Petersbourg, London and Berlin, and will feature notable personalities of the time such as the aviators Pégoud and the British Capt. Alcock, as well the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II. “The purpose of these screenings is to show how relevant this footage, and this history, can be today,” Rongen-Kaynakçi underlines.
Werner Herzog’s fiction feature Rescue Dawn (2006) and doucmentary Little Dieter Wants to Fly (1997) both deal with the story of German pilot Dieter Dengle, shot down in Vietnam when flying for the US in 1966. “The intention is that EYE and IDFA work together in the future. That means that certain IDFA programmes can be made in co-operation with the EYE collection, such as the WWI programme that we see now, where part of the films came from our archive,” comments programmer Marike Huizinga. “These programmes are a first start this year, and is definitely our intention for future collaborations with IDFA.”
The Based on the Same Story programme, presented by IDFA in co-operation with EYE consists of seven doc/fiction pairings, all of which will be subject to in-depth post-screening examination to elicit the points of similarity and departure in their treatment of the subject. A central question will be whether a documentary is by definition more truthful than its fictional counterpart, or whether interpretations within fiction can in fact lead to a greater understanding of reality. The pairings include another Kevin MacDonald film, this time his fictional account of the life of Ugandan despot Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland (2006), which will be screened with Barbet Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada. An audience of public and professionals alike will also
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Werner Herzog’s documentary Little Dieter Wants to Fly (top) and his feature Rescue Dawn, both of which chronicle the life of pilot Dieter Dengle
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Talent Focus
Six of the Best Six of Holland’s most talented young documentary producers will receive the full IDFAcademy treatment into 2013. The six producers, chosen by the Netherlands Film Fund, will get to know better the international documentary landscape, attending industry events such as the Forum and Docs for Sale. They will also be granted the enviable opportunity to discuss their latest projects with some of the world’s leading financiers and commissioning editors. “We take them into the kitchen of IDFA to see how internatio nal finance works,” comments the Film Fund documentary consultant Pieter Fleury, “to meet the top people and to have a first hand feel of co-productions, and in the process raise the profile of their associated production company. They can exercise their talents pitching in a very unique way – it has always been very difficult to arrange meetings with the likes of the BBC and ARTE. This is an excellent example of how the Film Fund can collaborate closely with IDFA.”
Estelle Bovelander graduated in photography at The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.
She has produced more than 30 documentary films for various production companies and works regularly with acclaimed documentary directors, such as Menna Laura Meijer, Sabine König and Paul Cohen. She has been a freelance producer for Zuidenwind Filmproductions for the past eight years, producing documentaries in the USA, UK, South Sudan, Egypt, Niger, Burkina Faso, Germany and at home in the Netherlands.
co-productions. I attend documentary festivals worldwide, in search of co-producers and co-productions. I think it is continually necessary to expand our focus to the international workfield, in order to create vivid, innovative and intelligent documentaries for a wide audience.”
Iris Lammertsma
Besides documentary producing Estelle has worked for Fortissimo Film Sales, was FORUM producer at IDFA FORUM and worked for a variety of other festivals. For the Dutch Museum of National History she produced 45 short films as content for the smartphone app ’X Was Here’. “Documentaries tell us stories about the world we live in – whether next door or about places beyond our imagination. They give us new perspectives and more things to consider. That is what makes documentary films valuable for me.
runs JvdW film with director Boudewijn Koole. The company focuses on creative, social and youth documentaries and on dance films, its particular strengths being concept development and intensive coaching of the filmmakers. The resulting films are innovative, visually powerful, challenging and strong in content. The company also looks to develop young talent. Because of the specific expertise JvdW film has at its disposal (Boudewijn Koole has much experience in giving direction to fledgling film-makers), Lammertsma believes they are in an excellent position to achieve this. Recent productions include Off Ground (Boudewijn Koole and Jakop Ahlbom), Tonight we’ll become women (Josefien Hendriks), The Spoiler (Sanne Rovers) and Happily Ever After (Tatjana Bozic). Lammertsma is currently producing and developing several (inter)national documentaries such as Plaza de la Soledad (Maya Goded), Gay Marriage Chinese Style (Sophia Luvara), Transit Havana (Daniel Abma) and Bring Home the Jews (Eefke Blankevoort/ Arnold van Bruggen).
“When we produce internationally we apply a broader range to the film. A stronger foundation helps to enhance the quality of the film; it means more possibilities for the production itself as well as the distribution. In co-producing, we meet new people and learn creative solutions from each other. A fresh input broadens our frame of thinking. This helps the process of filmmaking, and creates a strong framework for the director. It is, for me, very inspiring to work in supportive co-operation, with new communication technologies, building the basic structure of the production.”
“At JvdW film we work internationally. We co-produce several international documentaries and are actively searching for international
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Wout Conijn works as a producer and director at his company Conijn Film. In 2005 he graduated from the Film Academy as director with his film My Turn which was selected in IDFA Highlights of the Lowlands section, winning the Tuschinski Award. His stated ambition is to offer the conditions for delivery of creative excellence, and is currently focusing his production efforts on the next documentary film of Tom Fassaert, whose An Angel in Doel was selected for Berlinale Forum 2011. In 2013 he produced his first fiction feature, How to Describe a Cloud by David Verbeek, which was selected for IFFR Spectrum. “On a 9-month journey by bike, across the Himalayas I developed a global consciousness. Travelling through all those countries gave me the inspiration to become a documentary director. My award winning graduation movie at the Amsterdam Film Academy was shot in seven countries across four
different continents. As a producer I’m working on international projects focussing on global audiences. I am currently working on three documentaries with directors from mixed backgrounds, namely South Africa, Israel and Iraq. Conijn Film is an advocate of international co-production, both in documentary and fiction projects.”
successful young jazz trumpeter who calls time on his career after his first album.
include international co-productions and animation. Projects include The Successor of Kakiemon (Suzanne Raes/ Submarine), Poor Us - an animated history of Poverty (Ben Lewis/Submarine), Off the Grid (Alexander Oey/Submarine), The Only Son (Simonka de Jong, IDTV Docs) and The Rainbow Warriors of Waiheke Island (Suzanne Raes/IDTV Docs).
“The documentaries we produce at 100% Halal are often conceptual in nature and have a strong visual language. For me, the aesthetics of a film are as much a storytelling device as the subject matter. To tell good stories a balance between form and concept is key. Finding this balance takes a long and watchful process between the director and producer.
“To me producing means creating the right atmosphere for a project to flourish: organising the production structure for the financing of the film, and balancing the needs of a production with the creative needs of the director. Key to my approach is creative problem solving, creating an atmosphere of open communication, and keeping focus on the goals of production, combined with attention to detail.”
“All of the work we make at 100% Halal focusses on an international audience, be it fiction, documentary or commercial film. As a documentary developer and producer I try to go beyond the ordinary. In a search for new stories you need to be inquisitive by nature and reflective upon what happens around you.”
Roel Oude Nijhuis is partner and documentary producer at 100% Halal, an Amsterdam-based film production company and photography agency. Recent productions include It’s in the Sky (2013, Sarah Domogala), about how fashion trends are connected to the spirit of the times and to our deepest values, and Kookaburra Love (2013, Sjoerd Oostrik), a voyeuristic documentary about love and violence. Also in 2013 came the company’s Louis the Ferris Wheel Kid (Tara Fallaux), about a traveller child whose life in the funfair comes to an end when he has to attend high school. The 2012 Youth of Today (Sam de Jong and Sjoerd Oostrik) is a portrait of three young people and their struggles in growing up. The company’s 2011 Kyteman, Now what? (Menna Laura Meijer) is about the phenomenally
Ilja Roomans
Judith Vreriks
commenced her career in 1998 at TV DITS, the documentary production house of renowned filmmaker Ireen van Ditshuyzen. In 2003, after 5 years of production work, Ilja took up the position of executive producer for Van Ditshuyzen’s projects. After the incorporation of TV DITS into IDTV, Ilja continued in the role of executive producer until 2011. Since then, she has worked as line producer at Submarine expanding her experience to
has over ten years of experience of producing, writing and researching feature documentaries. Early in her career her short documentary Schoolyard (2005) and mediumlength Esmiralde, sixteen years in 9 scenes (2007), were broadcast by Dutch broadcaster HUMAN, and in 2007 she was nominated for the Dutch Award for New Film and Television Makers. When at Cobos Film she worked closely
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with award-winning Dutch filmmakers John Appel (The Player) and Heddy Honigmann (Forever). Since October 2011 she has been executive producer for Zeppers Film. Recently finished productions include the multiple award-winning feature documentary 900 Days by Jessica Gorter. “What comes first is my passion. There are so many reasons to make documentaries, but for me it all starts with the urge to listen to, and to tell stories to, as many people as possible, and to open up to what documentary makers have to say or want to show. “I see myself as a kind of a wall for the director to lean against when needed, to pin up little memory cards or whatever. And I always hope they see me as a second or inner voice, and as a companion. And of course finding the audience, through festivals, broadcasters, releases, is in itself a completely different process that I’d like to develop further.”
Dutch Industry News
Short Cuts ¡Vivan las Antipodas! by Victor Kossakovsky, an international co-production (Dutch partner, Lemming Film)
Interactive Reality This year IDFA and Amsterdam’s Brakke Grond are organising an Interactive Reality programme to celebrate storytelling in the age of the interface. The programme consists of an exhibition, a series of live cinema events, a talent lab and a one-day international conference. Speakers include Jonathan Harris (creator of We Feel Fine and I Love Your Work), Vincent Morisset (BlaBla and Just a Reflektor), Marianne Levy Leblond (ARTE France), Brent Hoff (Emotional Arcade), Kira Pollack (TIME Magazine), the National Film Board of Canada and many others. The event will be moderated by IDFA’s Caspar Sonnen, Brakke Grond’s Veerle Devreese and EDN’s Ove Rishoj Jensen. The programme is made in collaboration with the Netherlands Film Fund. “We recognise that across the world there are great talents in the field of interactive reality, and that it is difficult for professionals within the low countries to reach the same level,” comments the Brakke Grond’s Devreese. “As all the top digital pioneers are in Amsterdam for IDFA, then there is a great opportunity to address this issue.”
€20 million co-pro boost From 2014 the Dutch government will invest an additional €20 million in the local film industry in order to boost the country’s attractiveness to international filmmakers. Dutch ministers Weekers (Finance), Kamp (Economic Affairs) and Bussemaker (Education, Science & Culture) acknowledged the competitive disadvantage for the Dutch film industry internationally. Over the last few years the Netherlands has been unable to attract international film productions, while Dutch film producers were often forced to shoot and post-produce their films abroad. Recently a research by Oxford Economics, commissioned to gauge the effectiveness of film measures already in place across numerous other territories, concluded that employment levels in the European film
sector have shown a growth of 11.5% since 1998, whereas Dutch employment figures fell 16.7% in the same period. This added fiscal incentive will come in the form of a cash rebate, which will stimulate spending within the Netherlands and will give a considerable boost to the Dutch production sector, with increased levels of employment, as well as cultural benefits. Film Fund CEO Doreen Boonekamp comments: “This positive outcome is crucial for the future and quality of the national film industry. Dutch film professionals can now compete internationally on the basis of quality. We expect this measure to enable more foreign producers to shoot and produce in the Netherlands.”
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The event will create a ‘masterclash’ to bring together international and local experts – “the masters” – and the professionals of the Lowlands. These include such diverse talents as radio documentary makers, an augmented reality expert, classical documentary filmmakers making the transition in to transmedia (some of whom Devreese describes as “the most curious and high level early adapters”), and experts working with drone technology. “We will put them in a one-room arena to create dialogue, to confront each other with each other’s work and to discuss concepts of the future,” she underlines.
Teledocs success
69: Love Sex Senior
Netherlands Film Fund documentary consultant Pieter Fleury spoke to See NL before IDFA 2013 about the wider festival and cinematic potential for films made for the Teledoc strand. Teledoc is a collaboration between the Dutch Public Broadcasters, CoBO and the Netherlands Film Fund, which every year oversees the production of six new feature-length documentaries, made ostensibly for a wide primetime TV audience about a contemporary Dutch subject. The break-out potential for these projects was noted after the sales and festival/box-office success, both domestically and internationally, of Meet the Fokkens after IDFA 2011. This year Leonard Retel-Helmrich’s Raw Herring world-premiered at
Niek Koppen in focus IDFA and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision have selected director Niek Koppen, formerly head of documentary at the Netherlands Film Fund, to be Documentary Maker in Focus for 2013. Central to the programme is the screening of his new archive film Dutch Darlings, created for the occasion, as well as three other career highlights, The Battle of the Java Sea (1995), Gold (2007) and Siki (1992).
“We are moving more and more towards a cinema release for these films. Potential selection for festivals such as IDFA stimulates producers to make more theatrical product, which further stimulates international exposure, sales and international sales. The Teledoc is now a true Film Fund window to help producers find a theatrical release for their documentary,” stresses Fleury.
Wildcards awarded Film students Ingrid Kamerling, Inge Persoon and Anna Peeters are the recipients of this year’s Wildcards, awarded by the Netherlands Film Fund, to the most promising young filmmakers from this year’s graduation crop. The winners each received 40,000 euros to produce a documentary film on any subject of their choice, under the guidance and supervision of a producer and director coach. It is hoped that these docs will be ready for the Netherlands Film Festival in 2014.
was a world I related to. Maybe this is what I wanted to show my children. “I am looking forward to do Q&A’s with audiences at IDFA about Dutch Darlings and also my old films. They seem a long time ago after having had a real job [at the Film Fund] for 5 years...”
“It was a good opportunity to finish a film that has been on my mind for years but otherwise would probably have taken much more time to make,” he comments of Dutch Darlings, which depicts continuing adherence to traditional customs across parts of Holland. “It is a simple film about my own country. People here in Amsterdam often think that we are the real ‘Nederland’. But that’s a false idea. We are just a part of it. When I was a kid the world I portray in the film
Tribeca to great acclaim. F.I.S.H.I.N.G. (Pieter-Rim de Kroon and Maarten de Kroon, WINDMILL FILM) had a theatrical release in the Netherlands after broadcast and the 2013 IDFA selection 69: Love Sex Senior by Menna Laura Meijer will go to cinema after the festival.
“For each film I visualise the state of mood and thoughts of my main character before I start filming,” comments Kamerling. “I’m very happy and honoured to receive this Wildcard! All these kinds of visual experiments that I do always cost so much time. Because of this prize, I have the opportunity to continue with my visual research and apply it to my new film!” Anna Peeters adds: “I can now trust in the fact that I made something
Still: Dutch Darlings
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worthy. This prize gives me the opportunity to continue with my way of making films and to expand and experiment with that.” Inge Persoon: “I’m still not exactly sure about my new film, which I’ll make with the Wildcard money. But I am almost certain it’s gonna be a documentary with singing, just like my graduation film. Only this time there will be more other people singing and less of me singing.”
Sales overview
Selling Dutch docs It is only to be expected that NPO Sales, the international sales arm of Netherlands Public Broadcasting, takes IDFA very seriously. “I think it is still as strong as ever,” NPO Sales boss Kaisa Kriek declares to Geoffrey Macnab, acknowledging how despite severe cuts within arts spending, IDFA has soldiered on, always looking for new, ever more inventive ways to promote docs.
Kaisa Kriek
NPO Sales has eight films in Dutch competition and another 10 new films in Docs For Sale. Like other sales agents, NPO will be arriving in Amsterdam with two versions of many of its titles - the theatrical and the shorter TV cut. “With almost every documentary, we need a 52 minute version.” There are theatrical distributors at IDFA but, Kriek suggests, it remains a challenge to get Dutch docs into theatres internationally. “It really needs to be a strong film on a strong subject - and preferably not completely Dutch-spoken.” Films about local Dutch subjects have little traction in the international marketplace. “If it is too Dutch, we cannot sell it,” Kriek says. Ask the NPO Sales boss about trends among her buyers and she
points out that the economic crisis has affected acquisition policies. “For example, I work with a few distributors in Italy but documentary selling is almost non-existent there. In southern Europe it is very hard to sell documentaries nowadays.”
producers, among them Pieter van Huystee, Submarine, IDTV Docs and Windmill Films. NPO Sales is a division of NPO, the umbrella organization of Dutch public broadcasters. “For a small country like the Netherlands, it is important to have one visible window for international sales of public tv content,” Kriek comments.
However, the market for Dutch docs remains robust in Scandinavia, French-speaking countries, Eastern Europe and closer to home in Belgium. In Japan, largely thanks to broad caster NHK’s continuing appetite for films on social issues and current affairs, matters are just as rosy.
Although Kriek attends IDFA’s co-production market The Forum as an observer, NPO Sales doesn’t tend to come on board projects until all the financing is arranged. “If Holland has a majority in a co-production, it might come into our catalogue but if another country has the majority, it will go to another distributor.”
Elsewhere in Asia, Kriek sees clear signs of growth. “We sell to Taiwan, South Korea and China,” she notes. There is a steady appetite among Asian buyers for mainstream fare - travel docs, history films and the like. Kriek points to TV series The Beagle, On the Future of Species, about Charles Darwin, as an example of a Dutch doc that was sold to China.
As the sales arm of NPO, Kriek’s outfit has a public service remit. As she notes, there is an ongoing debate about how much profit public broadcasters should make. The main goal for these broad casters is to serve the local Dutch audience. However, in a period of severe cutbacks, Kriek argues that there should be more focus on the profits that can be generated through international sales.
When it comes to selling documentaries, Kriek warns that there are rarely fixed prices. “It is a new negotiation every time!” she exclaims. The cost depends on the country, on the rights the broadcaster wants, free TV, pay TV or digital, on the number of runs.”
Producers are not obliged to take their docs to NPO Sales. Kriek and her colleagues have to compete against other international sales agents, and if they don’t perform well, they are likely to lose new movies to their competitors.
Smaller European countries who are regular customers would expect to spend €5000 to €7000 an hour for Dutch docs. However, when big players like ARTE are in the frame, looking for material for prime time slots, they will pay far more.
Nonetheless, if there is a Dutch documentary “brand,” NPO is responsible for creating awareness of it in the international marketplace. Kriek points to the way the company has promoted VPRO’s hardhitting “Backlight” docs.
NPO represents both the broadcasters in Holland and many leading Dutch independent
NPO Sales has also become
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increasingly active in selling Dutch docs online. One perennial debate is how best to reach younger audiences who no longer watch TV regularly. The obvious answer is to target these audiences online and NPO Sales is therefore striking revenue sharing VOD deals with web platforms. “We try to get MGs (minimum guarantees) but it’s difficult, so mostly it is revenue shares!” Kriek came to NPO Sales after working with several independent distributors, among them PolyGram. “Of course, NPO is different because it is a public company,” Kriek notes. Working for a company that represents the public broadcasters, she is far more involved in debates about strategy and public service than she would if still in the private sector. Nobody is pretending that these are easy times for public broadcasters. However, Kriek points out that Dutch documentary remains “a very vibrant and creative world.” In spite of the cut backs, public television has reaffirmed its commitment to documentaries. “There are always strong stories to be told,” the NPO Sales boss reflects. “The demand for that will never go away.”
Still: Days at the Lennon Park, one of NPO Sales’ Docs for Sale
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Production Overview
Dutch Competition IDFA 2013
15 Attempts
Awake in a Bad Dream
Days at the Lennon Park
Director: Aliona van der Horst Production: De Familie, in co-production with HUMAN Sales: NPO Sales Portrait of artist Suchan Kinoshita with observation and perception as central themes.
Director: Peter Lataster, Petra Lataster-Czisch Production: Lataster Films in co-production with HUMAN Sales: NPO Sales Breast cancer casts the lives of three women into turmoil.
Director: Annelies Kruk Production: Trueworks, Anniefilm Sales: NPO Sales How a bronze statue of Beatle John triggers the ‘residents’ of the Lennon Park to dream.
69: Love Sex Senior
Borders
FC Rwanda
Director: Menna Laura Meijer Production: Zuidenwind Filmprodukties Sales: NPO Sales Elderly people of seventy and over give us an honest and disarming look into their sex and love lives. (Also in Doc U Competition)
Director: Jacqueline van Vugt Production: Pieter van Huystee Film Sales: NPO Sales Africans migrating to Europe have to make their way through brutal border areas where violence, extortion and exhaustion are all commonplace. see page 16
Director: Joris Postema Production: Bonanza Films in co-production with EO. Sales: NPO Sales Sport brings people together, but have the people of Rwanda really found peace with each other 20 years after the genocide? A film about the soccer pitch as a stage for Rwanda’s political reality.
Ana Ana
Broadcasting the End
Killing Time
Director: Corinne van Egeraat, Petr Lom Production: ZINdoc, co-produced by LomFilms, Daydream Productions. Sales: NPO Sales Four young Egyptian women show their inner worlds in a cinematically poetic, intimate and brave way in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. see page 14
Director: Martijn Payens Production: Mp2 Media An apocalyptic tale about a village and its boss, men with their cameras and a magic mountain. (Also in First Appearance Competition)
Director: Jaap van Hoewijk. Production: KV Films in co-production with VPRO Television. Sales: North America: Films Transit. World sales: NPO Sales Killing Time reconstructs a criminal act and the implementation of the resulting penalty. (Also Mid-Length Competition)
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Land of Promise
Ne me quitte pas
Director: René Roelofs, Paul Scheffer Production: Interakt Land of promise shows how immigration has changed Europe over the last sixty years
Director: Sabine Lubbe Bakker, Niels van Koevorden Production: Pieter van Huystee Film, in co-production with Storyhouse Film (BE) and Studio Godot Sales: Pieter van Huystee Film/Public Film Flemish Bob and the Walloon Marcel, two Belgian friends share loneliness, humour, alcoholism and suicide plans with great élan. (Also Feature Length Competition)
Misha and So On
Photo-Eddy
Director: Cherry Duyns Production: Stichting Enveloppe Bandleader, composer, pianist and icon of free jazz Misha Mengelberg is losing his memory to dementia, but how is it affecting his performance, and that of his the world famous ensemble ICP?
Director: David de Jongh Production: Pieter van Huystee Film The son of photographer Eddy de Jongh offers this highly personal and painful portrait of his father, using archive material, interviews and archive audio recordings.
Moving Stills
Shado’man
Director: Tinus Kramer Production: Viewpoint Productions Sales: Illumina Films A film following world renowned photojournalist Kadir van Lohuizen.
Director: Boris Gerrets Production: Pieter van Huystee Film, in co-production with Les Films d’Ici (FA), Pippaciné (NL/UK) Sales: Pieter van Huystee Film/Public Film A community of friends, with severe physical and psychological challenges, survives on the nocturnal streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone. (Also Feature Length Competition)
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Production Overview
Dutch selection at IDFA 2013 Kids & Docs
Hear This!
Louis the Ferris Wheel Kid
Tonight We’ll Become Women
Director: Soulaima El Khaldi Production: BOS Tristan would like his father to be the coach for his soccer team. But his dad is deaf, and Tristan’s club isn’t so keen on that.
Director: Tara Fallaux Production: 100% Halal Productions The move from elementary school to high school is even more life-changing for Louis than for his peers, as he’ll have to trade in life at the travelling funfair...
Director: Josefien Hendriks Production: JvdWfilm. Two teenage girls on a sleepover discuss the things that are vitally important to them: love, friendship and periods.
A Home for Lydia
Once Upon a Tree
Via Dolorosa
Director: Eline Helena Schellekens Production: KRO Youth Lydia was born in the Netherlands but is still waiting on a residence permit. She tells her story, partly in songs she wrote herself.
Director: Marleen van der Werf Production: HUMAN When the trees close to Filine’s own favourite are cut down, she comes up with a creative way of saving the woods from destruction.
Director: Menno Otten Production: BALDR Film Each year, pious men carry heavy religious statues in a procession through the Via Dolorosa in Malaga. In close-ups we see both their suffering and their sublime passion.
Little Miss Piggy
Through the Fire
Nothing is Going to Happen
Director: Ellen Voet Production: Cerutti Gilm Eleven year-old Brechtje lives on a pig farm, but she dreams of life in the big city.
Director: Miguel Narings Production: AVRO Twelve year-old Marijn has enrolled in the art academy and is working on his first exhibition, which will be judged by an adult jury.
Director: Roeland van Doorn Production: Roeland van Doorn The artist Roeland van Doorn plucks unencrypted signals from security cameras and uses them to create an impression of clandestine surveillance in the Netherlands.
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Paradocs
IDFA DocLab Comp for IDFA Competition for Digital Documentary Student Documentary Storytelling
Music documentary
Hidden Wounds Interactive
The Call
Mattanja Joy
Director: Tomas Kaan Production: Prospektor An interactive version of a subdued video about the lives of war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder,
Director: Reber Dosky Production: Netherlands Film and Television Academy Can a goatherd manage to persuade his son to abandon life in Istanbul and return to his ancestral Kurdish home?
Director: Ellen van Kempen Production: Movedmedia After her turbulent years in London, singer-songwriter Mattanja Joy Bradley tries to make her way in a new life.
The Sochi Project
White Soldier
Whatever Forever: Douwe Bob
Directors: Arnold van Bruggen, Rob Hornstra Production: Prospektor This multimedia slow journalism project tells the shadow narrative to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Director: Danielle Zini Production: Yair Moss Palestinians, conscripts and colonists are confronted by an artist dressed as a soldier all in white, who turns deadly seriousness, humour and discipline upside down.
Directors: Linda Hakeboom, Rolf Hartogensis Production: VARA A portrait of musician Douwe Bob Posthuma and his father Simon, who is now paying the price for his own rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.
Stand-up docs
Unspeak
Directors: Benoit Detalle, Geert van de Wetering, Jennifer Abbott, Marija Jacimovic, ́ ́ Menno Otten, Rob Schröder, Tommy Pallotta Production: Submarine In this web documentary based on found footage, journalist Steven Poole explains at breakneck speed how the public debate is being corrupted with ‘unspeak’. (See submarine.nl)
The Happy Sad Route (and a Comedian) Director: Linda Hakeboom Production: Het Station Dutch comedian Jan Jaap van der Wal travels to the former Yugoslavia, where a fledgling comedy scene attempts to get past the traumas of its recent history.
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Lataster&Films presents
Awake in a bad dream a film by Petra Lataster-Czisch & Peter Lataster editing Mario Steenbergen line producer Marty de Jong sound Gertjan Miedema sound design Hugo Dijkstal grading Xandra ter Horst commissioning editor HUMAN, Bert Janssens a Lataster&Films documentary in co-production with HUMAN television made with the support of