Interviews

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.”

Marina Meijer’s new documentary returns to familiar ground as she profiles a Rotterdam adolescent whose fate as to whether he stays at home or taken into care is decided upon by a team of anonymous social workers. “But I made very clear from the beginning. For me, this is not a film about youth care. It is a film about a boy and his mother and […] the threats from the outside world,” says Meijer.

There can be few films in IDFA this year as disturbing as The Lost Souls Of Syria, a world premiere in the festival’s Frontlight section. Directed by Stéphane Malterre and Garance Le Caisne, the film tells the story of the thousands of people tortured and killed by the Assad regime in Syria and of the agonising battle for justice fought by their relatives and friends. The filmmakers explain the work to BDE.

“We have taken some hits,” a weary-looking stuntwoman sighs early on in Elena Avdija’s debut feature doc Cascadeuses (Stuntwomen), an international premiere at IDFA. The film, sold internationally by Andana, recently won the Focus Competition at the Zurich Film Festival. “We had this question, who are the few women who do this job and what are they facing in their lives,” the director tells BDE.

“Being dead is BOOM,” says one kid in Sara van Oostrum’s very touching short doc about death, receiving its international premiere at IDFA. Another kid opines how, “when you’re dead you don’t fart anymore, and your heart stops beating.” Other children reflect on their very painful experiences of the passing of grandparents, and some older participants talk movingly about their late partners. The director tells BDE why she made her new doc.

Dutch Nirit Peled discusses her new doc, world premiering at IDFA, about the nightmare situation suffered by mothers whose sons are placed on the crime prevention lists drawn up by the authorities. “Intuitively, I felt there was something very interesting and very filmic in looking through parental eyes at youth criminality,” the director says.

There can be few documentaries that make their point as succinctly, or indeed as persuasively, as Sarah Vos’ White Balls on Walls, world-premiering November 11 at IDFA. It is a film very much of the time in which we are living, that tackles head on the subject of ethnic and gender diversity, or rather the lack of it, both within the board room and within the culture we consume.

“It's about diversity, inclusion and making sure that people find the way to connect to their audiences and articulate their very personal artistic voices,” Industry Head Adriek van Nieuwenhuijzen explains to BDE of the offer to professionals on the eve of IDFA 2022. “We really want to be influential when it comes to exploring new ways of storytelling.”

Lea Glob first met Apolonia Sokol in 2009 – when Glob was a film student in Copenhagen and Sokol was a bohemian art student in Paris. Sokol’s life journey has taken tumultuous twists and turns in those intervening 13 years – she is now an internationally award-winning painter – and Glob has been there to document every step of the way, she explains to BDE.

Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden discusses her affectionate portrait of a favoured aunt who, during her final years, succumbed little by little to dementia. The portrait is funny, touching and very personal. At one point, when tasting a delicious morsel Ria remarks how it is “even better than an orgasm,” a phrase that the director claims her aunt was happy to resort to even when having her toe nails clipped.