IDFA FILMS: INFORM AND ENGAGE

As someone who appreciates attending documentary-only film festivals, I must admit that after a few days, it can become a bit of a slog. This is not due to the films, particularly at a high-end event like IDFA, the acclaimed International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, which ended its 11 day run on Sunday. If anything, it is the opposite. The films presented are so visceral, so challenging, so disturbing, so awakening, that it truly is a shock to the system to see them in the marathon fashion favored by festival goers like myself.

Among the films that both outraged and motivated me this past week were BLOOD IN THE MOBILE, Danish director Frank Piasecki Poulsen's "Roger And Me" quest to get at the bottom of "blood minerals" from the Congo that are imported by one of the world's most successful technology companies Nokia; THE GREEN WAVE, director Ali Samadhi Abadi's powerful mix of essay, animation and actual clips of the uprising in Iran following the election of 2009; the horrendously demanding and difficult lives of the rickshaw drivers of Calcutta beautifully captured by South Korean director Seong Gyou-Lee in MY BAREFOOT FRIEND; the agonies of facing the truth in the aftermath of a bloody war in Swedish director Staffan Julen's MY HEART OF DARKNESS; and the numbing monotony and excruciating boredom that sometimes erupts in violence in the wars in Afghanistan and Iran, as experienced by the combat troops in ARMADILLO by Danish director Janus Metz.

The above is only scratching the surface of the topics presented in the past week and a half. For the viewer, there can only be an initial reaction of shock, followed by a numbness and feeling of weakness in the presence of such monumental issues and problems. However, in each of the above films, the filmmakers have made a point of saying that the conditions and situations portrayed in the film ARE subject to change, if there is the will and the motivation to do so. That is the challenge of these films and the challenge that we each take home with us from IDFA.

By Sandy Mandelberger

Asian and European Films Top IDFA Awards

by Sandy Mandelberger, North American Editor

Asian and European films dominated the top awards at IDFA, the International Documentary Film Festival, which held its awards gala yesterday afternoon at the historic art nouveau movie palace, the Tuschinski. The audience, made up of filmmakers, professionals and doc film buffs, loudly applauded the winners and the overall excellence of this year's program.

The VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary (with a cash prize of €12,500) went to Lixin Fan for Last Train Home, about the heroic journey undertaken by countless Chinese workers each year from the new industrial areas to their families in the provinces. The film, which was produced with funds from the Festival's Jan Vrijman Fund, impressed the jury with its cinematic technique and the strong emotional pull of the story. The jury also awarded a Special Jury Award to Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith for The Most Dangerous Man in America (USA). The film is a portrait of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who in 1971 leaked the seven-thousand page report The Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, an act of defiance that turned the tide of public opinion against the war and eventually led to both the end of the conflict and the termination of the presidential reign of Richard Nixon.

Bong-Nam Park received the NPS IDFA Award for Best Mid-Length Documentary (€ 10,000) for Iron Crows (South Korea), about the largest ship-breaking yard in the world, which is in Bangladesh. The jury was impressed by the raw courage of the workers depicted in the film, as well as the moral stance of the filmmakers documenting their lives. The same jury awarded Marcin Janos Krawczyk the IDFA Award for Best Short Documentary (€5,000) for Six Weeks (Poland). This short documentary is an intimate portrait about the amount of time, following the birth, given to parents in Poland in which to change their minds about giving up their child for adoption.

The IDFA Award for First Appearance ( €5,000) was presented to the Irish team of Ross McDonnell and Carter Gunn for Colony (Ireland/USA), which deals with the phenomenon Colony Collapse Disorder, whereby bee colonies disappear without trace after swarming.

The first Dioraphte IDFA Award for Dutch Documentary (€5,000) went to John Appel for The Player. In this film, Appel goes in search of the essence of the gambling addiction, taking his late father as the starting point.

The Nederland 2 IDFA Audience Award (€5,000) was presented to The Cove (USA) by Louie Psihoyos. This spirited action documentary promotes the cause of dolphins, who are captured and killed in large numbers in the Japanese coastal resort of Taiji.

Sabrina Wulff received the IDFA Award for Student Documentary (€2,500) for Redemption (Germany), a film about three deserters from the American army who fled to Canada, from where they relate their memories of the – in their opinion senseless – war in Iraq.

The IDFA DOC U! Award, consisting of €1,500 awarded by a separate jury of young people, went to The Yes Men Fix the World (France/USA) by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. In this sharp, entertaining documentary, the Yes Men pretend to be spokespersons for large companies, using this ruse as a platform from which to criticise the free market.

Before the winners were announced, Amsterdam alderman for Culture, Carolien Gehrels, officially launched IDFA TV. IDFA TV is the online documentary channel, where more than 30 documentaries from the IDFA archives can be seen all year round, for free. Next year, the selection will be expanded to approximately 200 documentaries. Most of these films will be available free of charge, but IDFA is also planning to experiment with pay systems. The documentaries concerned will be both recent and older films that have screened at IDFA.

Festival Director Ally Derks introduced the event, announcing with great fanfare that this year's edition would have its highest attendance figures ever. More than 165,000 audience members are expected to attend screenings through the end of Sunday. The number of international guests reached a record of 2300 this year, bringing together documentary makers, financiers and distributors from a wide spectrum of media.

IDFA is not only a festival with a mission, but it is remarkably a very public event with strong mainstream support. Most screenings were sold out in advance, with enthusiastic audiences that lingered at the various screening theaters to discuss and debate the themes in the films they had just seen. With multiple audience and professional events studded throughout the Festival, this is an experience that engages and involves the audience in a very unique way. Hats off to the IDFA team for creating such a professional and committed atmosphere that leaves one enriched, sometimes enraged and energized to fight the good fight.

Burma VJ To Open In United States

by Sandy Mandelberger, North American Editor

BURMA VJ, a Danish documentary that won the Joris Ivens Competition at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA) in November, will open theatrically at New York’s most prestigious arthouse, the Film Forum. The film, which had its North American debut this past weekend at the Sundance Film Festival, has also been acquired by cable giant Home Box Office for a 2010 television premiere.

The film, the definite buzz title of the IDFA program, looks at last year’s uprising against the military dictatorship in Myanmar, told through secret home video footage. The film offers an unprecedented look at the movement and it’s organizers, which includes Buddhist Monks who vocally demonstrated for changes in the repressive Burmese government. The mass demonstrations in Rangoon drew international attention through secret video footage of a band of journalists known as the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) that was smuggled out of the country and beamed around the world. The film, which also won the Movies That Matter Prize at IDFA, recently was an award winner at a documentary film festival in its native Denmark.

IDFA Announces Winners In Amsterdam

by Sandy Mandelberger, North American Editor

IDFA came to a smashing and glamorous climax last evening at the IDFA Awards Ceremony. Winning the Joris Ivens Competition, the Festival's most prestigious prize, was Burma VJ--Reporting From A Closed Country by Danish director Anders Ostergaard. The film is a gripping chronicle of the 2007 uprising by Burmese monks, which creates a political and religious crisis in a country that is viewed as the most repressive regime on earth. Nearly all the footage in this fascinating and historically significant work was shot by native, covert video journalists, who risked their lives in getting the story out to the rest of the world. A few have since been arrested and are spending time in jail awaiting criminal prosecutions.


The film mixes staged shots with authentic footage and reconstructs telephone coversations, weaving in the dramatizations with the factual set pieces to powerful effect. The filmmakers provide an honest and deliberate portrait of the courage, the struggle and the sacrifice of those who stand up for the rights of the people in a regime that does not tolerate descent of any kind. The film also won the Movies That Matter prize for best social issue documentary. For more information, visit the film's website: www.burmavj.com

The popular favorite and winner of the IDFA Audience Award was RIP! A Remix Manifesto by Canadian Brett Gaylor. The film displays the artistic virtuosity as practiced by such popular remix artists as Girl Talk, who construct contemporary club music by "mashing up" well-known pop tracks and creating a musical sound all its own. The film explores the many legal and copyright-oriented issues involved in re-using popular music and imagery, while defending the first amendment right to comment and react to an existing work of art. The film includes segments with fellow remix artists, along with a lawyer/lobbyist who speaks at industry forums and college campuses about his strong urging of the U.S. government to loosen its grip on strict copyright law to allow for the popular expression of "mash up" reworkings. What is born is a manifesto that takes on the powers that be and reestablishes the right of the common citizen to interact with popular culture that is part of the public domain (although corporate copyright lawyers would disagree with that assessment. Making it clear that downloading of imagery and audio tracks and the disemination of the remixed works over the internet cannot be fully policed, the film invites viewers to engage in the issue of public versus private and an expansion of rights where consumers are no longer passive but are encouraged to actively engage with the media that surrounds them. The film also recently won a Special Jury Prize at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal. The public is invited to remix the existing film into their own "mash up" by visiting the website: www.opensourcecinema.org

IDFA WINNERS

Joris Ivens Competition
"Burma VJ - Reporting From a Closed Country," (Denmark/Sweden/Norway/UK, Anders Ostergaard)

Silver Wolf Competition
"Boris Ryzhy," (The Netherlands, Aliona van der Horst)

Silver Cub Competition
"Slaves - An Animated Documentary," (Sweden/Norway/Denmark, Hanna Heilbronn and David Aronowitsch)

First Appearance Award
"Constantin and Elena," (Romania/Spain, Andrei Dascalescu)

IDFA Student Award
"Shakespeare and Victor Hugo's Intimacies," (Mexico, Yulene Olaizola)

Dioraphte Audience Award
"RiP - A Remix Manifesto," (Canada, Brett Gaylor)

Movies that Matter Human Rights Award
"Burma VJ - Reporting From a Closed Country," (Denmark/Sweden/Norway/UK, Anders Ostergaard)

DOC U! Award
"Kassim the Dream," (USA/Germany, Kief Davidson)

The Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund Award for Documentary 2008
"Monsters Under the Bed," (The Netherlands, Sarah Mathilde Domogala)

Austrian Documentarist Nikolaus Geyrhalter At IDFA

by Sandy Mandelberger, North American Editor

IDFA has selected Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter to present the annual Top Ten program at this year's Festival. As part of the program, Geyrhalter will present a few of his own films and other documentaries that have influenced him.

Among those Geyrhalter films being showcased are Pripyat (1999), which won the Diagonale Grand Prize Award at the Diagonale Film Festival, as well as the SCAM Award at France's Cinema du Reel. His best known film, Our Daily Bread (2005), a look at the international business of food farming, was a major documentary hit, winning nominations as Best Documentary at the European Film Awards and winning the Special Jury Award at IDFA. His latest film, 7915km (2008), about the people who live along the route of the Paris-Dakar rally, is competing in the Joris Ivens Competition here.

Among the films that have influenced Geyrhalter's visual style, the program will screen such landmark films as Good News: von Kolporteuren, toten Hunden und anderen Wienern (1990) by his compatriot Ulrich Seidl, Koyaanisqatsi (1982) by Godfrey Reggio and Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002) by Peter Mettler. The sole fiction film in the group is iconoclastic director Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005). On Sunday, 23 November, Geyrhalter gave a master class in which he discussed his Top 10 and his own work.