Head of Industry Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen articulates the business offer at IDFA 2019, and explains why, for some attendees, the next few days will be a little less nerve-wracking.
Firstly, a word to pitching producers and filmmakers at IDFA Forum. If you are preparing for that terrifying process of presenting your new opus to the world’s leading commissioning editors and production/finance/sales execs, all sat around you in an oppressive horse-shoe configuration looking stony-faced, then relax. This year Forum’s pitching format is a lot different.
No more central pitches, but tailor-made presentations to smaller groups of decision makers who are hand-picked to take the project further. “We want to break from this very formal way of presenting the documentaries because not all documentaries are the same. We stand for greater diversity within the genre and that should be reflected within the structure of Forum,” stresses Van Nieuwenhuijzen.
Forum has become the go-to model for doc festivals and markets in the raising of (co-)production finance. When the festival last mounted a survey on Forum results, they discovered that 95% of projects eventually went into production. Not that all the finances were raised in Amsterdam, but nevertheless Forum was pivotal in launching these new films into the world.
This year the IDFA programme includes 21 films previously pitched at Forum, including IDFA opener film Sunless Shadows, Meng Han’s First Appearance Smog Town and the inventive 3D doc Cunningham (Alla Kovgan, Best of Fests). The Kids Competition selection Anbessa (Mo Scarpelli) was a past Forum project, as was the Instagram-themed DocLab project nerd_funk.
Previous selection for Forum won’t always guarantee an IDFA nod, Van Nieuwenhuijzen is quick to stress, as a further 40 former projects were rejected for festival selection in 2019.
“What I think is interesting is that Forum kicked off as a gathering of European broadcasters – that’s how it initially started, from an awareness that the filmmakers as well as the broadcasters needed to make international alliances to make the flow of production money more reliable in order to make films. Literally, when you’re on your own you can’t make big films,” Van Nieuwenhuijzen underlines.
She adds: “If you have really strong international collaborations, it’s not only about money, but also how you look at your documentary. It’s also speaking about how you as a team are more aware of the cultural influences of each country, so in that sense international documentary collaboration is very interesting. At the same time, it is super relevant that these filmmakers keep their own cultural and artistic identity.”
To illustrate this, Van Nieuwenhuijzen cites the North Macedonian documentary Honeyland, about Europe’s last female wild-beekeeper living with her elderly mother as “a great example of having this awareness of the bigger world and what’s happening, and at the same time speaking with a unique artistic voice which is recognised across the world.”
From the 2019 Forum selection Van Nieuwenhuijzen cites Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion’s Eternal Me as one she believes will enjoy great success in the future. “It’s tapping into the almost futuristic world where technology is becoming so important that it might replace humans,” she stresses. “We had films in the past like that in Forum, like iHuman (world-premiering at IDFA 2019). This type of film is becoming almost a genre in itself.”
She also mentions Nishta Jain’s The Golden Thread (India). “She’s doing an immensely human film about workers in a factory. It’s observational, but it’s also looking at how she herself as a filmmaker observes it, so it has these many different and complex layers to it.”
Docs for Sale (DfS) remains “the biggest gathering of the documentary sales community, and of course these people are here do business,” stresses Van Nieuwenhuijzen. “For sales agents it’s a super relevant place because everyone is here and it differs so much from markets like Berlin where there is a lot of documentary content, but the atmosphere is not documentary. That makes IDFA and Docs for Sale a very unique place within the calendar of festivals and markets.”
The 2019 DfS catalogue includes 400+ films, which will be viewed by approximately 200 accredited viewers, more or less equally divided between festival programmers, commissioning editors/buyers and distributors/sales agents.
The industry panels in 2019 are diverse, such as on how to actually make a living as a documentary maker, “which is of particular relevance to many IDFA attendees”.
With the upcoming Audiovisual Media Service Directive in mind (whereby online services must provide at least 30% of European content within their catalogues) what does that mean for European filmmakers? And how are smaller European SVOD platforms surviving/operating in the face of the major concerns such as Netflix?
“I think what is good about the industry programme is that it’s very diverse. And it’s more informative, like how does the American market look in terms of finance and how can I as a non-American approach this market?” comments Van Nieuwenhuijzen.
“But in artistic terms the panels are also relevant for those festival people who don’t only talk about business,. They also cover the form of documentary. How do we tell these stories, what are the more artistic stories that filmmakers want to make, how do these evolve? Or is story and character the only way to tell a story?”
“Our aim is to be informative but also to raise debate and to ask questions, and also to inspire people. We have devised a programme in which we have tried to work across all these lines.”
