IDFA Documentary Film Festival Opens in Amsterdam

The largest documentary film festival, IDFA, has opened in Amsterdam, bringing together more than 3,000 film industry professionals. He talks about the political overtones that emerged this time Andrey Plakhov.

IDFA has always been dominated by the leftist political agenda. But the most recent turbulences have caused a split in these friendly ranks. Unlike the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that excited last year’s festival, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that came to the fore divided the film establishment in its priorities: everything turned out to be “not so simple.”

When artistic director Orva Nirabia welcomed guests at the opening ceremony of the festival, his speech was interrupted by the appearance on stage of three demonstrators holding a banner “From the river to the sea. Palestine will be free.” The festival website describes this action in a politically correct tone: “During the opening evening, the artistic director was taken by surprise by activists. Nirabia briefly gave them space and continued with the event. IDFA would like to make clear that it distances itself from the slogan stated in the activist canvas and reiterate that it is a platform of global freedom, empathy and compassion that fundamentally advocates for the protection of human rights around the world.”

After these beautiful words, an equally colorful digest of the press conference is given, where Nirabia focuses on the difference between journalism and documentary film. The first provides an immediate response to events, the second offers a broader perspective, analysis and forecast, sometimes in the form of a premonition: that oppression breeds extremism, and lack of hope breeds anger and violence. In conclusion, there was a call to “honor the memory of all victims.” In the comments on the site, the words “Israel” or “Palestine” were never mentioned, not to mention “Hamas.” However, the artistic director, albeit with restraint, still greeted the Palestinian “activists.”

For obvious reasons, the focus of attention was the competition film “Life is Beautiful” by Palestinian Mohamad Jabali. The director tells the story of his forced emigration to Norway: he came to a film festival in Tromsø, and at that time Egypt closed the border with his homeland – the Gaza Strip, and Jabali cannot return there. Norwegian intellectuals and filmmakers show miracles of kindness to support a colleague and help him win a battle with the local bureaucracy; Only a few years later will the hero and author of the film be able to return to Gaza. The Amsterdam public greeted this personal statement from the hot territory with thunderous applause, although the picture “distances itself from extremism”, and the word “Israel” appears in it only once and not in the most aggressive context.

IDFA, which is called the “Cannes of Documentary Filmmakers,” is a huge festival and provides a platform for a wide variety of films, not necessarily limited to the current agenda. Thus, the film “The Metamorphosis of Canuto” is imbued with the mysticism of life in a Brazilian village on the border with Argentina, inhabited by the descendants of the Guarani Indian tribes. Director Ariel Quaray Ortega himself comes from there and several years ago came to visit his grandfather, a home-grown philosopher and mythologist. From him, the grandson learns about the peasant Canuto, who turned into a jaguar and died tragically in the forest. Ariel reconstructs this mysterious story using local residents and teenagers as “actors”; work on the film stretches over several years; as a result, the director himself almost identifies with his hero. The film probes the boundaries between reality and fiction, document and folklore, glorifying the powerful beauty of nature and human life inscribed in it.

One of the wittiest short films at IDFA is included in the Paradoxes program, is only eleven minutes long and is called “The Film You Are Now Seeing.” French director Maxime Martineau has collected the most extravagant warning signs before films on behalf of producers, distributors or cinema owners. The oldest of them belong to the Lumiere era, and the newest ones belong to the Pixar era.

Some of these inscriptions, in their absurdity, can be likened to instructions on microwave ovens, discouraging consumers from placing four-legged pets in them. For example, one inscription states that “the film you are about to see” refers to the author’s experimental cinema, contains obscene scenes of masturbation and gay sex, as well as other scenes that can cause side effects – in particular, a gag reflex, and in these cases spectators are urged to run to the toilet in time. Another inscription not only informs that any attempts to film from the screen during a show are fraught with criminal prosecution, but also informs potential criminals that the cinema hall is equipped with a special alarm for this subject, and the license plates of cars in which lawbreakers try to escape from the cinema are automatically recorded .

For all the comedy of such paratexts, they, collected in historical sequence and edited with iconic footage from famous films, but in reverse chronological order, provide food not only for emotions, but also for the mind. They provoke reflection on how cinema, vibrating between image and text, itself seeks to put itself in a legal straitjacket, resist the ambiguity of images and protect the audience from atavistic fear and psychic attacks.