Geoffrey Macnab

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.

About a Hero, which opens IDFA 2024, is an adaptation of a script generated by the AI programme Kaspar and based on the musings of no less a hero of the medium than Werner Herzog. “We trained a very primitive model on the works of Herzog but focused on his books, transcripts of his voice-overs and transcripts of his interviews, basically spoken and written-word Werner. The process wasn’t just ‘press a button and the script popped out.’ We could sense the quality quite early on,” director Winiewicz tells BDE.

The new Autlook CEO tells BDE about her IDFA slate that include Sandra Beerends’ Neshoma, world-premiering in Luminous. Also on the bill are DOK Leipzig winner Once Upon A Time In A Forest and European Film Awards Documentary nominee No Other land. In a lighter vein is Patrice: The Movie. “Buyers are telling us that they want something a little bit more light-hearted - and this is light-hearted without being lightweight,” Fuch says of Ted Passon’s crowd-pleasing romcom doc.

Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui discuss their highly emotional new feature doc Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (a market screening in IDFA), which tells the story of the brilliant, Juilliard-trained actor, plucked from anonymity to star as the Man of Steel in the Superman movies. After a catastrophic horse-riding accident in 1995 left him paralysed, Reeve became a campaigner for disabled rights.