Reviews

Stylistically bold and as timeless as it is topical, All You See explores the alienation migrants experience coming to the Netherlands. It’s a strong opening film for IDFA, as its main question concerns every documentary in the programme: we look at people, but do we see them?

It is tough to strike the right tonal balance when it comes to looking at the impact of poverty on the vulnerable in society, but while Łukasz Kowalski’s humour in his new doc may well be pitch-black at times, the Best of Fests film is also astutely compassionate as it dwells on staff and customers as they struggle to deal with their harsh lives.

The final feature of the great Jan Švankmajer had its world premiere at Ji.hlava as a near two-hour director’s cut. This documentary on his idiosyncratic collection of art and other imaginative objects feels like stepping inside the surrealist mind of the illustrious Czech filmmaker – including its darker sides.

In Cisco Kid, world premiering in Ji-hlava Opus Bonum Competition, a solitary young queer person is single-handedly rebuilding a ghost town in Utah. The film looks great. In fact, the whole thing looks more or less how you’d imagine a ghost town would look in frontier times. And to see one person, hammer in hand, trying to revive it is mind-boggling.

What is it like to be young and female and/or queer in this day and age, when social media is part of your daily practice, defines who you are, undermines or boosts your self-confidence? Answers can be found in this atmospheric, sensitive and revealing documentary set in the world of girls on the verge of adulthood.

Would you send a digital version of yourself out onto the worldwide web? Not just any old avatar, but a precise copy of you, looking, speaking, laughing and moving exactly as you do. In Uncanny Me it is 26-year-old Lale who finds herself in this predicament. A calm, understated, highly personal yet thoroughly thought-provoking documentary about a dilemma created by the highly technical world we live in.

Heinz Emigholz’ multi-layered and meditative architectural essay Slaughterhouses of Modernity juxtaposes literal modernist slaughterhouses in Argentina from the 1930s with the newly built replica of the Berliner Schloss and the triumphant works of Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani. The question is: who or what is being slaughtered here?

An impressive student film, world premiering in DOK Leipzig’s German Competition, about the Mozambican contract workers in the GDR who were forced to return after German reunification, and the children they left behind. These include children like Sarah, who has been questioning her Afro-German identity and now is taking her own child to Mozambique for a family visit.

Constructed from home videos from the 1990s and early 2000s, Love Is Not An Orange, which world-premiered in Leipzig, paints a fascinating portrait of the impact independence had on Moldova, formerly part of the Soviet Union, a country that struggled to make the transition from communism to capitalism, and all seen through the prism of family relationships.

With the striking vista of volcano Katla looming large and ominously over the Icelandic village of Vík í Mýrdal, the town’s inhabitants have developed a relationship with the potentially dangerous volcano and set about using it as a lure for tourists, creating a source of considerable prosperity. The problem is that an eruption is way overdue. Or maybe that’s why the tourists are there in the first place…