Geoffrey Macnab

In his new documentary, Egyptian filmmaker Bassam Mortada looks back at just how his father’s imprisonment upturned his own life, and that of his parents. The very personal movie is about the impact of “the big history” of Egypt on the “very small history” of his own family. “It took us five years. We were very lucky we were more able to get backing from a lot of Arab funds that support independent filmmakers,” Elsayed notes of the film’s supporters like the Doha Film Institute.

Lidija Zelovic left Bosnia for Amsterdam when the war in the Balkans began, but has recently noticed an equally disturbing rise in intolerance and xenophobia in The Netherlands. It chronicles the way that the Dutch political scene has increasingly come to resemble the powder keg in the Balkans she remembers from 30 years ago. There is an intolerance and xenophobia in the Netherlands that she simply doesn’t remember from when she first arrived in the country, she explains.

The prolific Dutch duo are back at IDFA with their heart-rending documentary about the Ukrainian babushkas (grandmas) currently sheltering in Amsterdam as war continues to rage back home. “The city made a big effort to find places for them. We wanted to do something in regards of what it means to be a displaced person,” Peter Lataster explains of his and partner Petra’s intentions with their film.

The Niger city of Agadez lies deep in the Sahara desert. It’s a very long way from Brussels but it was still part of a strange EU experiment. There was an attempt to create a new security border there, to combat terrorism and stem migration - a sort of Schengen equivalent in the African sands. Gerald Igor Hauzenberger and Gabriela Schild’s On The Border, a world premiere in IDFA, makes it clear why this border plan was doomed to failure. The filmmakers explain more to BDE.

“The subject of propaganda was one of the most interesting things for me. I wanted to go deeper into that…” Dutch director Luuk Bouwman underlines of his new film, selected for IDFA International Competition. The Propagandist profiles Dutch filmmaker Jan Teunissen (1898-1975) who, during the Nazi era, was called the “czar” of the Dutch film industry, and who boasted of personal friendships with the likes of Goebbels.

Leading doc sales agent Esther van Messel, founder and CEO of Zurich-based First Hand Films, arrives in Amsterdam this year with an IDFA international competition title on her slate. Writing Hawa, from director Najiba Noori, is the story of an Afghan woman who refuses to abandon her dreams finally to learn how to read and start a business after the Taliban sweep back to power. Van Messel talks to BDE.

In 2021, the forested border area between Belarus and Poland became a “forbidden zone.” Refugees caught there were forced back into Belarus, often in brutal fashion. “We felt it was our obligation, our call, to witness what was happening there,” remembers director Zuzanna Solakiewicz whose film, co-directed with Zvika Gregory Portnoy, was transformed when an unexpected ‘guest’ arrived in the forest.

Simone van den Broek, documentary consultant at the Netherlands Film Fund, is in typically upbeat mood on the eve of this year’s IDFA that sees two Dutch features in International Competition. “From our perspective as a fund and, in general, as supporters of the Dutch documentary industry, I think this is a very interesting year with great Dutch films,” she enthuses.

In her latest American-themed doc, Auberi Edler ventures to Elizabethtown in Pennsylvania, a community that reveals in microcosm the huge divisions between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, that exist across the US. “I wanted to understand what was happening at ground level, if I can use that expression; to be within a community, and I felt that the best way to understand what was causing the fracture was to follow an election, in my case the school board election.”

Israeli Danae Elon’s new documentary shows how, more than half a century ago, design and the perception of beauty were key elements in an “invisible war of annexation” in Jerusalem, and architecture became a weapon in a process of colonization and dispossession. “To me, the built environment and the buildings themselves represented something that was very visceral. It was expressing the entire ideology that allowed it,” Elon tells BDE.