Festival coverage sponsored by Indiepix.
Sascha Paladino, director of the award-winning documentary THROW DOWN YOUR HEART, files this reflection on IDFA after his first trip to the festival in Amsterdam:
As a first-timer, bringing my film to IDFA was like stepping into a Documentary Disneyland. For the ten days of the festival, Amsterdam truly transforms into a documentary paradise. Everywhere you turn you see amazing films, brilliant filmmakers you've always wanted to meet, engaging panels, attentive funders, cool parties and interested audiences. With 300 docs in the lineup, it's pretty overwhelming.
Looking over the schedule and reading the descriptions of all the films was exhilarating and paralyzing. But once I realized there was no way I could partake in every single event and screening, I loosened up and went with the flow. (And, made a mental note that spending four days at IDFA isn't nearly enough to do it justice.) As festival director Ally Derks writes in her welcome note, the festival is like a labyrinth, and everyone needs to navigate it depending on their tastes and time.
IDFA is divided into various strands, including the film festival, the Docs for Sale marketplace, IDFAcademy, Media Talks, and the Forum. The Forum is devoted to filmmakers pitching their projects to broadcasters, very similar to the Hot Docs Pitching Forum, which I had the fascinating and stressful experience of participating in a few years ago. I wanted to observe some of the pitches, but without a Forum pass I was unable to get in (and they were pretty strict on the rules). I ran into some folks who were in the throes of pitching, including Andrew Berends, who was recently detained in Nigeria while shooting his new project. It was great to meet him and hear more about his new film, especially after reading so much about what had happened to him and seeing how the documentary community rallied to his support.
One of the things that struck me about the festival was how well technology was integrated into the whole experience. For example, the audience award tallies were constantly being updated, so that every time you went into the festival headquarters you saw a flatscreen monitor with the latest standings and scores, kind of like the Olympics. (Brett Gaylor's RiP: A REMIX MANIFESTO ended up taking the award, after a battle for first with buzz film BURMA VJ: REPORTING FROM A CLOSED COUNTRY and PERSONA NON GRATA.) The standings were also reported each morning in the half-Dutch, half-English daily festival newspaper.
The festival was tightly organized, and encouraged an active dialogue between its participants throughout. The daily social hour (and a half), aptly titled "Guests Greet Guests," was a good way to hook up with old friends and make new ones. It was interesting to meet filmmakers with such different motivations for being at the festival. Some were there to show their films, some to sell their films, some to raise money for the films they hadn't yet made, and some, incredibly, were doing all of those things at the same time.
With so much going on, it was easy to feel like my film might get lost in the shuffle. So I was a bit nervous about how many people would show up for my screenings. But boy, if there's one thing I learned, it's that the Dutch love their docs. I was thrilled with the turnout – a full house for both screenings that I attended. (At the glorious Art Deco Tuschinski Theater, and the Arclight-on-steroids Munt Theater) While there were some fellow filmmakers and festival folks in the crowd, it seemed like they were mostly locals.
They were engaged and responsive audiences, with thoughtful questions and comments during the Q&A. The best and most revealing came from the Dutch woman who pulled me aside and noted that during the first few musical performances in my film, there are a few lines of voice over from one of my main characters. "I just wanted to hear the beautiful music, but you kept interrupting it!" she said. "And I thought, 'Don't you Americans ever shut up?'"
She had a point. There was lots and lots of talking throughout the festival, not only from the Americans but from the assembled global filmmaking community, about all sorts of issues related to the art, craft, and business of documentary today.
There were some fascinating conversations about the staggering number of docs about Africa that were included in the festival – at least 40 films dealt with Africa in some way, including mine. The festival acknowledged this fact in their opening night selection: EPISODE 3 – '"ENJOY POVERTY", a doc by Renzo Martens that posits that "images of poverty" are the Congo's most lucrative natural resource. There was lots of discussion about the preponderance of Africa docs, and the fact that most of them were made by European and American filmmakers.
One film that had everyone was talking was Anders Østergaard's BURMA VJ, about Burmese journalists reporting on the uprising against the dictatorship with hidden cameras. The film ended up winning the top prize as well as the Movies that Matter Award. I didn't get to see nearly as many films as I would've liked, but a few standouts for me were Joshua Weinstein's FLYING ON ONE ENGINE, a sly and surprising look at a brilliant Indian doctor, Matt Tyrnauer's entertaining and fascinating VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPEROR and Brett Gaylor's RiP, a playful and energetic look at mash-up master Girl Talk and the issues of copyright that spring up around sampling and remixing. The latter film also had the best parting gift of any documentary screening I've been to: During the Q&A, we were all invited to reach down into the space between our seats and armrests, and found our very own membership cards to the MLF, or Mouse Liberation Front, a group profiled in the film that sprung out of an artist's battles with Disney over his use of Mickey Mouse imagery in the 1970s. Documentary Disneyland, indeed.
IDFA does a wonderful job making its filmmakers feel like they are part of an international community of artists and activists. It's an amazing feeling, and one that I hope I can hold onto for a while.
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