IDFA 2021

Business Doc Europe talks to Meera Devi, Chief Reporter at Khabar Lahariya and core protagonist within Writing With Fire. “Both personally and professionally, it has really amplified the newspaper and its work. We have witnessed a completely different kind of popularity - and that is really good,” Meera says of the multi award-winning doc.

Judges Under Pressure is a film about grass roots protest. It is also a film about the protection of judicial neutrality. Most remarkably, it is a film in which judges are heroes, the ‘armour’ of the people, as director Kacper Lisowski puts it, and one in which those same citizens take to the streets to cry the word ‘Constitution’ in response to their own government’s erosion of that very concept. Lisowski tells more to BDE.

Endlessly fascinating, and equally recognisable to a Western audience, and following in the footsteps of Abbas Kiarostami’s classic from 1989, Tonight’s Homework, world premiering at IDFA, shows Iranian primary school children being interviewed about their lives.

It’s Saturday lunchtime in Amsterdam and Sergei Loznitsa, a very regular visitor to IDFA, is preparing for the world premiere of his latest film, Mr Landsbergis, a world premiere in the festival’s international competition. In a few moments snatched away from his lunch break, the ever busy Loznitsa explains the story behind his new doc.

For many years, Dutch films at IDFA were presented within their own special programme. This year the Dutch sidebar is gone. Instead documentaries from the Netherlands are spread throughout the festival, within the new Envision and International Competitions, and elsewhere. For Simone van den Broek, the new documentary Consultant at the Netherlands Film Fund, this turns out to be an inspiring change, she explains.

A lot of filmmakers come to Docs for Sale in search of a sales agent but not all of them can boast the excess interest Maartje Nevejan is receiving for her film Descending the Mountain, which opened November 11 in The Netherlands. The documentary makes the case for the widespread application of psychedelic drugs to treat illnesses such as depression, PTSD and anxiety.

Taamaden offers an intriguing and insightful take on young West African migrants who seek to find their way to Europe to try and make money for their families. The film dwells as much on the way the live as how they turn to trusted mystics and clairvoyants back in their home countries to help them make decisions and seek reassurance as to what the future holds in store for them.

An astonishingly open, moving, funny and challenging insight into the world of a woman paralysed but with her mind intact, Eat Your Catfish is remarkable in portraying an intimate and powerful portrait of a family stretched it its very breaking point. (Envision Competition)

For two decades the highly talented populist Norwegian politician Trond Giske turned down filmmaker Håvard Bustnes’ requests to be the subject of a fly on the wall documentary. Until 2017, that is, when allegations of sexual harassment were levelled at him, at which point he went on a tour around Norway to resurrect his political career. And this time, as the director tells BDE, the politician could see the benefits of answering Bustnes’ emails…

Artur Liebhart of Polish distributor Against Gravity and doc fest Millennium Docs Against Gravity briefed Business Doc Europe on recent all-rights pick-ups of IDFA 2021 titles plus selections for the 2022 festival slate.