Interviews

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.

Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui discuss their highly emotional new feature doc Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (a market screening in IDFA), which tells the story of the brilliant, Juilliard-trained actor, plucked from anonymity to star as the Man of Steel in the Superman movies. After a catastrophic horse-riding accident in 1995 left him paralysed, Reeve became a campaigner for disabled rights.

Aoife Kelleher’s new feature doc, which tells the story of the inspirational Irish politician, opens the Irish Film Festival London November 13. “There was a lot about her I didn’t know,” Kelleher tells BDE. I was surprised to learn about her early years with the Irish women’s liberation movement and the work she did there as a human rights lawyer. I really enjoyed digging into that period of her life.”

Anaïs Clanet of French sales company Reservoir Docs fills in BDE on her IDFA 2024 slate. While many films on her slate are selling well, other rapturously received films are proving a lot harder to shift. “It’s an extremely difficult period because public television does not buy a lot,” says Clanet. “I am being nice and kind saying that, because they pretty much buy nothing.”

What’s in a name? A lot, if you’re called John Smith, and you’ve developed, over the past 70-plus years, a psychological complex about bearing Britain’s most common name. In the very amusing Being John Smith, a recent winner at DOK Leipzig, the viewer is invited inside the mind of the eponymous director to understand what it is like to live with that curse. “Being called John Smith still undermines my sense of individuality and self-worth on an almost daily basis,” the director laments to BDE.