Geoffrey Macnab

No film at IDFA this year tells a story stranger or more unsettling than Love It Was Not, recent winner of Best Israeli Film at Docaviv and screening in Luminous. It’s an account of a love affair, if it can be described as such, between beautiful a young Jewish Auschwitz inmate, Helena Citron, and Franz Wunsch, a high-ranking SS officer.

These are halcyon days for Swiss documentary. The country has 11 different titles in official selection in IDFA, ranging from the opening film Arami Ullón’s Nothing But The Sun to another Feature-length competition entry Radiograph Of A Family to titles in Short Competition, Kids & Docs and all other corners of the festival too.

Sales powerhouse Cinephil has boarded Forum rough-cut project A House Made Of Splinters, directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont, about the plight of kids in war-torn Ukraine. Doc is being made by Final Cut for Real, responsible for The Distant Barking Of Dogs (2017) which was shortlisted for the 2019 Oscars.

Thomas Imbach’s IDFA competition selection Nemesis is a follow up of sorts to his Day Is Done, which premiered at 2011 Berlinale (and which was filmed over a period of 15 years from his Zurich studio). Nemesis was shot from the same apartment window. He opens up to Business Doc Europe.

Swiss-based First Hand Films is launching sales on There’s A Border In My Backyard, that looks at “the conundrum of our country’s European borders by way of a small, seemingly insignificant fence risen to protect one country’s tame pigs against another's wild boars.”

Anais Clanet of recently launched documentary outfit Reservoir Docs (part of the Urban group) may see tough times ahead for doc sellers, but is striking a very sweet note with her new feature The Quest For Tonewood.

Autlook Film Sales are handling the multi-director doc series Draw for Change! in Forum, a controversial documentary about Hitler and a new doc on the Cuban athletics god Alberto Juantorena.

London-based sales outfit Film Republic has confirmed that Netherlands distribution of IDFA opening film Nothing But The Sun by Arami Ullón is to be handled by Cinema Delicatessen, who came on board last week. Meanwhile, Cineworx will be releasing the film in Switzerland.

Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, the team behind Sundance hit The Truffle Hunters, have revealed further details of their new production company Beautiful Stories. The new outfit, which will make fiction as well as documentary, will be based out of the US and Sweden.

The pandemic has thrown up new challenges for the IDFA Bertha Fund (IBF) which, in September, announced it was backing a record number of new projects in the latest IBF Classic selection.