IDFA 24

IDFA’s AI-informed opener About a Hero is not, in itself, a very good film. But it’s a good opening film. And it’s extremely timely as a thought-provoking essay, as the documentary community should readily embrace a leading role in establishing AI guidelines to safeguard the public’s trust in the documentary image.

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.”

Neshoma tells a very particular history using found footage and archive, that of Amsterdam’s Jewish community between the two World Wars. Dutch director Sandra Beerends is of Indonesian heritage and herself married to a Jewish man. “I feel familiar with this wound because my mum had also a war trauma from the Japanese camps in Indonesia,” she says of her film’s subject. “It's not for nothing that I know a lot of couples in Amsterdam where one is Jewish and one is from Indonesia, because there are stories to share of how it is to live in captivity.”

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.

On the eve of IDFA 2024, BDE sat down with Italian documentarian Camilla Iannetti whose debut feature, The Golden Age, is about to celebrate its international premiere in the main competition of the Dutch gathering. The intimate doc, produced by Zabriskie with Cut&, follows Lucy, a music student from Palermo studying in England, who faces the end of her studies because of student debt. She is also preparing for the birth of her baby, Futura…

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.

Orwa Nyrabia talks to BDE about his seventh, and final, IDFA as Artistic Director. He speaks about this year’s programme and robustly counters accusations that he has overlooked European filmmakers and their industries during his tenure. He also addresses the opening night events of 2023 when pro-Palestinian protesters stormed the stage. “No matter our good intentions and misunderstandings, we made mistakes last year,” he acknowledges.

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.

The tangled complexities of the crypto currency and blockchain worlds are strikingly and economically explained in Bår Tyrmi’s documentary, Lie to Me, which details the rise and fall of OneCoin, the company that sold itself as the ‘BitCoin killer’ but which – surprise, surprise – turned out to be one almighty scam that drew in millions of victims.