IDFA: Emotional Start to World’s Most Important Doc Fest

IDFA head Ally Derks presenting doc filmmaker Frederick Wiseman with the fest’s first Living Legend Award Thursday night. Photo by Brian Brooks/indieWIRE

“The most hilarious, confronting and touching films have been selected for this year’s festival,” IDFA Director Ally Derks said from the stage, reflecting on this year’s lineup of 306 long and short form docs. “The films born here will make their way around the world.” Derks dedicated the opening night to the late producer and co-founder of Fortissimo Films, Wouter Barendrecht, who has received festival tributes around the world since his untimely death last Spring in Thailand. She recounted her time in school with him and even recalled holding hands with Wouter while aboard a plane that nearly crashed. “It’s incomprehensible he won’t be here to be a light upon the world,” Derks said.

With that, Derks went on to praise documentary, and cheerfully saying, “Thankfully the days of boring documentaries are no longer upon us.” She said that despite the economic crash, the form has survived, and even said she expects this year’s edition of IDFA to be a “turning point” for the festival. Before introducing the film, she gave a surprise award to Wiseman who was sitting in the audience, praising him for his past work and “the work to come,” presenting the 79 year-old director the first “Living Legend Award,” complete with a €5000 prize. “I will put it in the bank,” said Wiseman who is currently working on a film in Texas. Wiseman will present a Master Class at the festival later this weekend.

IDFA Director Ally Derks congratulates “War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them” director Dariusz Jablonski following the screening of his film, which opened the 22nd edition of the festival Thursday night. Photo by Brian Brooks/indieWIRE

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam Competition lineups with descriptions provided by the festival

IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary

“9 Months 9 Days”
Ozcar Ramírez González, Mexico, 2009

In early August of 2006, three Mexican fishermen were rescued from the sea. They were found near the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, more than 5,000 miles from home. After an accident on their boat, they were swept away and drifted for nine months and nine days. Once their identity was established, their story went around the world. In 9 Months 9 Days, journalists and camera crews are waiting for them when they come ashore. They explain that they survived by eating raw fish and birds, and by drinking rainwater they collected in empty gas tanks—not to mention their faith in God. They are received as heroes, but it does not take long for people to start doubting the truth of their story. While some say they are drug couriers, an American publisher is convinced that a miracle has occurred, and that God has called on him to adapt their story for the screen. The fishermen sign a movie deal and a new adventure begins, one in which the danger is coming from a very different perspective. With the help of archive footage and interviews, this documentary reconstructs their tale.

“Blood Relation”
Noa Ben Hagai, Israel, 2009

In the early 1940s, 14-year-old Pnina disappeared nearby her house in what is now Israel. Years later, she started sending letters to her family. It turned out that she had married an Arab and had children with him, but it is never completely clear if she ran away or was kidnapped. Director Noa Ben-Hagai found her great-aunt Pnina’s letters and asked her uncle, a retired colonel in Israeli intelligence, to find the unknown family in the Palestinian Territories. Blood Relation chronicles the various meetings between members of this Jewish-Arab family over the course of three years in both Israel and Nablus. Needless to say that these reunions do not go smoothly: the Arabs ask their family for help to get work permits, and the Israelis feel used. Conversations with family members from both sides illustrate how difficult it can be to bring people from such different and conflicting backgrounds together. The director begins to wonder if it was a good idea to have her uncle get in touch with their Arab family. And if reconciliation within just one family is so complicated, what does that mean for the reconciliation between the people of the Middle East?

“Contact”
Bentley Dean, Martin Butler, Australia, 2009

Contact features unique archive footage of an exceptional meeting that took place in 1964, in a desolate area of Australia. Yuwali is one of the Martu, a community of women and children who spent their whole lives living in the desert, until the area had to be evacuated for missile testing. In Contact, 62-year-old Yuwali vividly recalls how frightening it was to see white men for the very first time. She fled the area with a group of 20 Aborigines, afraid of the white “devil men” whom they believed would surely eat them. Yuwali’s eyewitness testimony is interspersed with the stories of the Australians who explored the area. It was a strange meeting for them as well, encountering a group with “absolutely no world sense at all.” Once the Aborigines had been found, their desert existence was at an end. They were given clothing for the first time in their lives and driven out to a Christian Mission. The Martu community now seems accustomed to its new way of life: watching archive footage of their people clad in nothing but a belt leaves them in stitches.

“Dreamland”
Andri Snaer Magnason, Thorfinnur Gudnason, Iceland, 2009

Iceland is an attractive spot for investors in green energy. The financial returns are enormous for this sparsely populated nation, but the negative impact on nature conservation is also significant. The American company Alcoa has convinced the Icelandic government to give up a large portion of the island’s eastern region for “green” aluminum production, leading to the loss of natural beauty, vegetation, animal life, and agriculture. Environmental activists view these actions as criminal, while left-wing economists believe they will bring only a temporary boost to the economy, rather than structural growth. As one economist says in Dreamland, “After this project, a new one will be needed, otherwise the economy will collapse again. It’s like keeping on drinking so as not to feel the hangover.” But the authorities can nonetheless be swayed by this kind of plan, even when it involves a company such as Alcoa, which is involved in the weapons industry in the United States. As another critic explains, “The company just promises a well-paid position to the politician after his term is over.” This claim gains credence when we learn that the mayor involved later worked as a project manager for—you guessed it—Alcoa. The film is an ode to a threatened landscape, with magnificent helicopter shots of breathtaking, rugged terrain where waterfalls, geysers and vast green steppes still abound—for now.

“Earth Keepers”
Sylvie Van Brabant, Canada, 2009

Eco-activist Mikael Rioux from Trois-Pistoles in Québec is looking for ways to create support in his own community for the creation of a more sustainable way of life. Having shorn off his dreadlocks at the beginning of the film, the young father decides to pursue a more constructive course of action than continuing his battle against the local authorities. Inspired by his mentor Christian de Laet—an old hand in the environmental movement—Rioux travels the world to seek the counsel of his mentor’s sympathizers in poverty-stricken India, in wealthy, progressive Sweden, and elsewhere. The problem is clear: there is a crisis on the way. Leaving the car at home once in a while is not going to be enough to avert an environmental disaster—not by a long shot. Earth Keepers shows that there are still opportunities for sustainable action, but only if we are prepared to change the way we think. Rioux’s voice-over, the talking heads, and the animations that elucidate the film’s sometimes complex issues all combine to convey a single message: “We need to start living in a way that provides for everyone’s needs.” And this is what makes Earth Keepers a worthwhile journey for outsiders as well as insiders.

“The Edge of Dreaming”
Amy Hardie, Scotland, 2009

If you dream your own death, can it come true? Director Amy Hardie thinks so. At least if you really start to believe in the dream. The Edge of Dreaming shows how this happened to her. One night, she wakes with a start after dreaming that her horse has died. The next morning, she finds him dead in the fields near her house. When, shortly afterwards, the deceased father of her oldest child comes to her in a dream and tells her that her next birthday will be her last, she starts to worry. She doesn’t want to believe it, but the thought just won’t let her go. The seed of fear has been sown and it starts to grow, particularly when she gets sick and can’t pinpoint the cause. While she films her family life and the changing of the seasons around her, she also dives into her richly documented past. Little by little, she becomes obsessed by the idea that she is going to die. Her search for a solution leads her to neuroscience, psychotherapy, Shamanism, and the insight that she cannot ignore the ravaged state of our planet. Her final conclusion is that she doesn’t want to live as if each day may be her last, but as if we will all be here forever.

“Enemies of the People”
Rob Lemkin, Thet Sambath, England, Cambodia, 2009

Enemies of the People takes a peek at “the project” of Thet Sambath, whose parents were among the approximately two million who perished under the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s. In an attempt to win their trust so they will admit to their deeds on camera, Sambath now spends more time and money on the erstwhile murderers than on his wife and children. We watch as Sambath contacts the culprits and confronts them with their past; one of them even demonstrates how he cut people’s throats. The filmmakers allow the horrific stories to speak for themselves, in contrast to the propaganda newscasts from back then, full of happily singing farmers. The only commentary is a recurring image of water in a rice field that flows so slowly, it is agonizing to watch. As the film progresses, it gradually reveals the scope and importance of Sambath’s hard work. The biggest fish in Sambath’s net turns out to be “Brother Number 2” Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s right-hand man. When he gets arrested and tried by a Cambodian court in 2007, we see a series of ghastly images of the torture chambers that were his own creation. Meanwhile, Sambath has put an end to his project so he can concentrate on his own future.

“Eyes Wide Open - A Journey Through Today’s South America”
Gonzalo Arijon, France, 2009

In his 1971 standard work Open Veins in Latin America, Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano describes the centuries of economic exploitation of his part of the world. Almost 40 years later, Uruguayan documentary filmmaker Gonzalo Arijon reevaluates the situation in Eyes Wide Open—A Journey through Today’s South America. His search takes him from the soybean plantations of the Brazilian Amazon and the tin mines of Bolivia to the deep jungles of Ecuador. Arijon, winner of the Joris Ivens Award in 2007 for Stranded, shows how the current crop of leftist leaders in these countries are attempting to resist the squandering of natural resources by large, international companies. The principal culprits he identifies are the neoliberal ideology and the ensuing wave of privatizations. Arijon’s politically committed film allows the local populations to speak for themselves, interspersing this with archive footage of speeches by the likes of Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Lula da Silva (Brazil), and Evo Morales (Bolivia). Galeano himself also talks—sometimes in poetic language—about how the rise of socialist governments in the early 21st century is benefitting Latin America, and what more can be done.

“Farewell”
Ditteke Mensink, The Netherlands, 2009

Constructed entirely of archive footage, Farewell is the story of English journalist Lady Grace Drummond-Hay. In August of 1929, two months before the stock market crash would plunge the world into the Great Depression, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst added Drummond-Hay to the passenger list of the Graf Zeppelin as the only female. This impressive airship would be the very first to make a voyage around the world. For this prestigious project, a symbol of hope and progress, Hearst was looking for someone who wanted to write about the trip “from a female perspective.” Drummond-Hay was ecstatic: “I shall write for him as if my life depended on it.” Under the supervision of her colleague and ex-boyfriend Karl Henry von Wiegand, she spent 21 days reporting on the flight, which started in New York and went to Friedrichshafen, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and ended back in the Big Apple. Needless to say, it was a trip that did not go off completely without a hitch. Using Drummond-Hay’s diary entries and newspaper articles as a basis, the film sketches a picture of the occasionally tough journey and a changing Europe. Drummond-Hay makes the viewer part of her impressions of the devastated continent. She tells of the funeral wreaths thrown from the Zeppelin over Verdun, riots in Berlin, and the rise of Communism in Russia, struggling with feelings for her ex-boyfriend all the while.

“Freetime Machos”
Mika Ronkainen, Germany, Finland

During a rugby match, Matti broke his pinky finger. It hurts something awful, but his friends just make fun of him: a real man would at least break an arm or a leg. In Freetime Machos, we meet Matti, his best friend Mikko, and a couple other members of the most northern and third worst rugby club in the world. What motivates a Finnish man? As depressing as the opening quote might make us think—“The bedroom is a place to sleep and to copulate, not to get pleasure through sex”—it is not all that bad. In a casual, lighthearted fashion, director Mika Ronkainen observes these melancholy men who are much more boyish and mild-mannered than they would like us to think. After losing the umpteenth match, they confide in each other on the bus. Company turmoil at Nokia plays a role, as do the suicide of a friend and changes in the family. One moving scene is the meeting with a foreign girl who wants to play on their team. She is pretty good, but the rules do not allow for coed play. When it is time for her to leave, one of the men takes her to the airport and embraces her. “At least one of the guys touched me to say goodbye,” she laughs.

“Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork”
Eyal Sivan, Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, 2009

The orange may not seem like the most obvious point of departure for an examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but during the last century, the disputed border area between Israel and the territories was one of the world’s biggest exporters of this “orange gold.” In Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork, director Eyal Sivan reconstructs how Jaffa started out as a Palestinian place name before becoming an Israeli brand name, and how the orange harvest shifted from a joint undertaking into a symbol used by both parties in the escalating conflict. The filmmaker uses a great deal of archive footage, from the very earliest photography in 1840 right up to crisp, modern video. The images are accompanied by commentary from a range of experts, who watch them projected on the walls of their offices or on tablecloths hung up in their living rooms. From historians to art experts, poets to political analysts, each gives his or her perspective on the archive footage, which over the years has become increasingly laden with ideological significance. Orange eaters and pickers—many of whom remember the more harmonious times when Jews and Arabs still worked side by side in the orchards—also have their say.

“Last Train Home”
Lixin Fan, Canada, China, 2009

“We work far away from home. The old and young are still in the village. If the family can’t even spend New Year together, life would be pointless.” These are the words of one of the countless Chinese workers who make the heroic journey each year from the new industrial areas to their villages in the provinces. In a calm and observational style devoid of comment, Lixin Fan captures two years in the life of one of these families. The father and mother left the poverty of the country 16 years ago to try their luck in the new economic zones, leaving their daughter behind with her grandparents. Now they work long hours in one of the numerous gray factories that supplies the West with cheap clothing. That said, the most toilsome endeavor is the New Year trip. The sight of the multitude gathered at the station is disconcerting, and the couple waits for a ticket for days. When a snowstorm throws rail service into disorder, the chaos is complete. They still manage time and again, but will they also succeed in keeping the family together and ensuring an education for their children, with the money they send home? Painful moments reveal that the patience the Chinese are known for has its limits.

“The Miscreants of Taliwood”
George Gittoes, Australia, 2009

This isn’t Hollywood, and it isn’t Bollywood: this is Taliwood. Australian filmmaker and visual artist George Gittoes spent two years in the Taliban-occupied north of Pakistan. The surreal war situation there doesn’t stop local filmmakers from making lowbrow movies with large doses of half-naked women, action heroes, and pulp fiction. “We want to see the local breasts,” one Peshawar video store owner declares, in reference to the need for local film production. The prevailing Taliban moralists are less appreciative of this, expressing their discontent by burning video stores to the ground. Gittoes gets to know the actors and actresses who play roles that put their lives in danger. Summing up the mentality of the fundamentalists, one actor remarks that “Making bombs is good, making movies is against Islam.” When Gittoes hears that the production of a TV movie only costs $4,000, he decides to make two of them. This leads to a film shoot full of hilarious gunfights, fake blood, and scenes with dwarves and action heroes. At the same time, he discovers that the Taliban is also disseminating a form of entertainment that people are just as greedy for: recordings of real beheadings and executions, not to mention propaganda films about Al-Qaida training camps. In the end, the largest film industry turns out to be the war on terror.

“The Most Dangerous Man in America”
Judith Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith, USA, 2009

During the 1960s, Daniel Ellsberg was one of the most promising analysts in the U.S. Department of Defense. This all changed when he was asked by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to draw up a secret report on the American presence in Vietnam. At the time, the war in Vietnam was in full swing. The outcome of his investigations led Ellsberg to realize that five successive U.S. Presidents had lied to the American people about their country’s role in the Vietnam conflict. He therefore decided to leak the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971. The Most Dangerous Man in America is a portrait of a highly intelligent man who chose above all to remain true to his principles of openness and justice—a decision that would cost him his career and lead to many years of legal battles with the American government. Interviews and historical footage create an impression of a dispute that eventually had far-reaching consequences for press freedom in the United States, as well as for the course of the war in Vietnam.

“The Player”
John Appel, The Netherlands, 2009

As this film makes clear, its director John Appel has a deeply rooted interest in gambling. His father was an ardent horserace player, which caused problems in the family to say the least. Shortly before he died, Appel’s father wrote him a letter while he was still at school. This letter serves as Appel’s point of departure for an investigation into the causes of his father’s destructive gambling mania, which he blends in the film with the stories of several other men, alter egos of his father. Interestingly, it is almost exclusively men who suffer from this dependence on gambling. Using family photos and films, Appel relates anecdotes to characterize his father and shed light on the events that led to his downfall. In between, we visit the horse races, where we meet an extremely good-humored bookie named Harry. Another Harry is a compulsive liar and gambling addict who is in jail for the umpteenth time. Even there, he cannot resist being deceptive. And we see a poker player who makes his tragic way from a Spartan hotel room to the casino each day. In Appel’s psychological portrait of his father, it gradually emerges just what drives the gamblers and why their addiction is so difficult to put a stop to.

“Space Tourists”
Christian Frei, Switzerland, 2009

In pursuit of their ultimate dream, more and more multimillionaires are traveling to Kazakhstan and the remote, hidden rocket launch site Baikonur and accompanying training centre, Star City. Here, Russian cosmonauts celebrated their achievements until Gorbachev pulled the plug on the space program in the late 1980s. Nowadays, the doors stick and the money is gone. In order to finance trips into space, the Russians now sell the third seat in the capsule to extremely wealthy Americans, who with a ticket costing $20 million, cover almost half of the cost. American businesswoman Anousheh Ansari is one of these travelers. Space Tourists shows, non-chronologically, how she prepares for the journey by Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station. In the meantime, Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen is searching for space debris for a photo series, along with the inhabitants of the neighboring, isolated villages on the steppes. They earn a little extra from the waste, which is often made from the very best materials. They use the titanium tanks as soup pans and sell the rest to China, where it is used to make aluminum. The worlds of the cosmonauts and the shepherds hardly touch at all. And when Ansari returns to Earth, Charles Simonyi, the principal designer of Microsoft Word and Excel, is ready and waiting impatiently for the next flight.

“War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them”
Dariusz Jablonski, Poland, Slovakia, 2009

A uniquely constructed portrait of the Polish Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, who provided the CIA with more than 40,000 strategic documents from the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. Was he a traitor, or the savior of Poland? The Polish documentary filmmaker Dariusz Jablonski begins his story of the colonel in 2004, when he was supposed to interview him for the very first time. It turns out that Kuklinski has just died, and at the request of the colonel’s wheelchair-bound wife, Jablonski agrees to take care of his ashes. He talks with a considerable number of closely involved ex-servicemen—from the U.S. head of espionage General William E. Odom to the Warsaw Pact Commander-in-Chief Viktor Kulikov, the Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski, and former Polish President Lech Walesa. These interviews paint a picture of an idealistic man who saved Europe from a Third World War, but who also led a tragic life. In addition to the extensive archive footage, Jablonski expounds on the initial meetings in voice-over, which he films with a small, often half-hidden camera. Subsequently, we see the official, tightly-framed interviews, over which he invariably employs an effect that suggests the shadow of Venetian blinds. Photos of Kuklinski come to life with 3D motion effects, and the recurring theme of a war game calls on the viewer to actively pass judgment on Kuklinski’s choice.

—additional IDFA competition film lineups continue on page two—