IDFA 2022

Dutch-based Colombian experimental filmmaker Ana Bravo-Pérez’s short doc, world-premiering at IDFA, reveals a sinister link between her motherland and her adopted home, that of the environmentally damaging coal production in Colombia and its transportation to the sea ports of The Netherlands to satisfy an increasing need in Europe for electricity.

“The name is Bond…James Bond.” “Hey, me too!” Paris-based sales outfit Reservoir Docs arrives at this year’s IDFA handling a Bond movie with a difference. Its new film The Other Fellow directed by Matthew Bauer explores just what it is like to share a name with the most popular spy in movie history. Company boss Anaïs Clanet gets shaken (but not stirred) with Business Doc Europe.

Huang Pang-Chuan and Chunni Lin’s homage to revered sculptor Huang Tu-Shui is a palimpsestic study of the passing of time, the changing of culture and the enduring power of art. The film follows the careful restoration of Kam-lōo-tsuí, Tu-Shui’s marble sculpture of a female nude, and the family who sheltered her from harm throughout the White Terror period.

Business Doc Europe caught up with Hadar Porubanova, managing director of the sales and distribution firm Ruth Films. “We were offered an unprecedented number of films this year, and only a few of them could make it to the Ruth Films’ catalogue. We try to keep things intimate, while picking subjects that are less covered by mainstream cinema,” she underlined.

Berlin-based Ukrainian artist and filmmaker Mila Teshaieva gives a vivid and horrific description of what it was like coming to Bucha for the first time after the city was liberated from Russian troops last April. She had to drive very carefully and slowly, zig-zagging to avoid the corpses. “I felt it was surreal,” she recalls to BDE. “you can’t understand at all how it is possible in the 21st Century.”

In Zsófia Paczolay’s stunningly cinematic short doc, selected for IDFA Short Competition, happy worker József lives and works within the largest operational grain silo in Budapest, descending via ropes and pullies into its gloomy depths to clean the walls. “We started to see him as some kind of an angel… with his soft and bright presence within this very harsh environment,” the director says.

Once in a while you encounter a piece of art which ticks all the boxes. Light Falls Vertical is one of those rare examples, offering a profound view into the souls of both a perpetrator and a victim of domestic abuse. It is an intimate record of the troubled mind, without ever being intrusive.

Dutch director Coco Schrijber discusses her film that portrays three women who survived abusive relationships - by becoming murderers themselves. “I have no history of violence in my family and my relationships,” Schrijber dismisses the idea she is drawing on her own experiences. Nonetheless, she was driven to make her movie by “the astonishing amount of women who are killed every year by their partners.”

This is not just a film, nor just a performance. It is an audiovisual and emotional art experience in honour of a young man that was murdered, one that grants you the opportunity to get to know this person and the ones that were left behind. The work offers no redemption. It just recognises the unfairness of life, the injustice and inequality of the society we live in and folk’s attempts to find a way to deal with it all.

For 13 years, director Lea Glob filmed her friend, the painter Apolonia Sokol. What starts out as a portrait of a charismatic young artist ends up, through the magic of longitudinal documentary, as a much more far-reaching picture of the art world, the struggle against patriarchy – and life. And a film you don’t want to see come to an end.