Interviews

In Bitter Love, screening in Best of Fests, Jerzy Sladkowski tells us that while the rest of the world takes to the road to deal their problems, Russians take to the river. In this instance on a Volga cruise ship, full of lonely hearts. The director talks to Business Doc Europe.

Saskia Gubbels’ Sheltered in Dutch Competition is a paean to love for our furry four-legged friends. But set in the Amsterdam Animal Shelter, it is also an indictment of the human species and its frequent propensity towards cruelty. The director explains all.

No film at IDFA this year tells a story stranger or more unsettling than Love It Was Not, recent winner of Best Israeli Film at Docaviv and screening in Luminous. It’s an account of a love affair, if it can be described as such, between beautiful a young Jewish Auschwitz inmate, Helena Citron, and Franz Wunsch, a high-ranking SS officer.

These are halcyon days for Swiss documentary. The country has 11 different titles in official selection in IDFA, ranging from the opening film Arami Ullón’s Nothing But The Sun to another Feature-length competition entry Radiograph Of A Family to titles in Short Competition, Kids & Docs and all other corners of the festival too.

An Ordinary Country, Tomasz Wolski’s immersion into the Secret Service archives of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, packs a considerable political punch, and delivers on an aesthetic level too. The Best of Fests director explains all to BDE.

Thomas Imbach’s IDFA competition selection Nemesis is a follow up of sorts to his Day Is Done, which premiered at 2011 Berlinale (and which was filmed over a period of 15 years from his Zurich studio). Nemesis was shot from the same apartment window. He opens up to Business Doc Europe.

Autlook Film Sales are handling the multi-director doc series Draw for Change! in Forum, a controversial documentary about Hitler and a new doc on the Cuban athletics god Alberto Juantorena.

IDFA Head of Industry Adriek van Nieuwenhuyzen talks to Business Doc Europe about this year's Forum (16-20 November) that not only catapults new projects towards funding and production, but also enables existing doc projects to engage in the type of co-pro interaction they have been denied by the pandemic.

“Filmmakers, young and old, showed up when the whole industry needed them. Watching these films makes one confident that cinema will survive,” Creative Director Orwa Nyrabia tells Business Doc Europe of the IDFA 2020 harvest.

The pandemic has thrown up new challenges for the IDFA Bertha Fund (IBF) which, in September, announced it was backing a record number of new projects in the latest IBF Classic selection.