Interviews

The Niger city of Agadez lies deep in the Sahara desert. It’s a very long way from Brussels but it was still part of a strange EU experiment. There was an attempt to create a new security border there, to combat terrorism and stem migration - a sort of Schengen equivalent in the African sands. Gerald Igor Hauzenberger and Gabriela Schild’s On The Border, a world premiere in IDFA, makes it clear why this border plan was doomed to failure. The filmmakers explain more to BDE.

“The subject of propaganda was one of the most interesting things for me. I wanted to go deeper into that…” Dutch director Luuk Bouwman underlines of his new film, selected for IDFA International Competition. The Propagandist profiles Dutch filmmaker Jan Teunissen (1898-1975) who, during the Nazi era, was called the “czar” of the Dutch film industry, and who boasted of personal friendships with the likes of Goebbels.

Martijn Blekendaal, whose The Man Who Looked Beyond the Horizon won the IDFA Special Jury Award for Children's Documentary in 2018, discusses the (super)heroic qualities required to remain invisible. “I grew up in a white environment where I always really stood out. I wanted to be invisible. Later, I realized that this desire is a ‘luxury problem’ compared to children who are forced to be invisible because they’re in hiding, being abused, or smuggled across borders,” he says.

In Pictures in Mind, Eleonora Camizzi uses the medium of cinema to confront her father, Vincenzo, who has schizophrenia, asking him the difficult questions she has avoided for years. Set in a minimalist, symbolic space, the documentary explores their strained relationship and the challenges of living with a father in a different reality. The director recalls: “When we first watched it together, he said, ‘luckily I said yes to this project; it’d be a shame if this film didn’t exist.’”

Leading doc sales agent Esther van Messel, founder and CEO of Zurich-based First Hand Films, arrives in Amsterdam this year with an IDFA international competition title on her slate. Writing Hawa, from director Najiba Noori, is the story of an Afghan woman who refuses to abandon her dreams finally to learn how to read and start a business after the Taliban sweep back to power. Van Messel talks to BDE.

Dutch filmmaker Miriam Guttmann discusses her remarkable new documentary in which the front line of war and the front row of Ukrainian culture intertwine. “This story distinguishes itself by interweaving the current war in Ukraine with the power of art,” says Guttmann. “The dancers used their talent as a way to preserve their humanity, and rather than fighting on the frontline, they continue their battle on the ballet stage.”

In 2021, the forested border area between Belarus and Poland became a “forbidden zone.” Refugees caught there were forced back into Belarus, often in brutal fashion. “We felt it was our obligation, our call, to witness what was happening there,” remembers director Zuzanna Solakiewicz whose film, co-directed with Zvika Gregory Portnoy, was transformed when an unexpected ‘guest’ arrived in the forest.

Love may be at the heart of Myrid Carten’s feature documentary debut A Want In Her, but it comes at a price. When the director answered a call to return from London to help find her mother who had gone missing somewhere in Ireland, her response to the crisis was immediate, but so was her reflex to pick up her camera to record the process. Carten talks to BDE about her film, world-premiering in Amsterdam.

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.”