Int'l Doc Film Festival Amsterdam 2009

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Sunday, 22 November 2009 23:47

Written by Lynne Shannon

The 22nd edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA)—the biggest documentary festival in the world—runs from November 19 through 29 at Festival Cinemas Pathé Tuschinski, Reguliersbreestraat 34; Pathé de Munt, Vijzelstraat 15; Amsterdam Public Library (OBA), Oosterdokskade 143, Rembrandtplein (Rembrandt Square) in Amsterdam.

The opening film, War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them by Polish director Dariusz Jablonski (1961), tells the story of Ryszard Kuklinski, a Polish colonel who during the Cold War passed on more than forty thousand strategic documents concerning the Warsaw Pact to the American CIA.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, five Russian documentaries that were screened during the first edition of IDFA in 1988 as part of its Glasnost program will be included in the Perestroika – 20 Years Ago program.

More than 300 documentaries will be screened in various (competition) programs. To complement the film program, IDFA is also organizing daily talk shows, debates and master classes that include guests such as Frederick Wiseman, Eyal Sivan and Ira Glass.

This edition also sees the first IDFA Lecture, given on this occasion by the English filmmaker Julien Temple. The nominations will be announced in the Talk of the Day on Wednesday, November 25. The award ceremony will take place on Friday, November 27, in Pathé Tuschinski 1.

Other programs include Reflecting Images: Best of Fests, with 31 documentaries that made an impact at international film festivals over the course of the past year. Reflecting Images: Masters explores the work of documentary filmmakers. This year, new films by Michael Moore, D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, Yoav Shamir, Michael Winterbottom and Frederick Wiseman will be among those screened. Reflecting Images: Panorama comprises 58 urgent, socially engaged documentaries.

Paradocs will feature daring experimental films at the interface of documentary and art. The 23 innovative films and videos in this program tell their stories in unconventional ways. The theme of Paradocs Talks will be The Making Of. Various filmmakers will provide insights into their working methodology in their own unique way. Participants include William Raban (4’22’’) and Jeanette Groenendaal (work-in-progress performance)

The Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan compiled this year’s Top 10. The most important themes in his selection for the Top 10 are the functioning of collective memory, ethics and the representation of history. These subjects are also central to Sivan’s own work. In addition to his Top 10 films, IDFA will also be screening his latest, Jaffa, The Orange Clockwork.

In honour of his 80th birthday, IDFA pays considerable attention to the work of Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman has directed and produced dozens of documentaries that explore social relationships in various American institutions. In addition to a retrospective of his work that he compiled himself, IDFA will also screen his latest film La danse – The Paris Opera Ballet.

All the films that won the Audience Award during the past ten years will be screened again this year in the Keuze van de Kijker (Viewers Choice). The public will also have the opportunity to evaluate recent films from this year’s program.

A jury comprising five youngsters will select the best film from the DOC U! program, which were shortlisted from the IDFA program by youngsters. The DOC U! jury consists of youngsters aged from 15 to 18 years old, who will confer the IDFA DOC U! Award.

Frederick Wiseman and actress Catherine Samie will participate in a special theatrical event based on Happy Days, a play by Samuel Beckett. This event will combine live performance, lectures, film fragments and a discussion about Wiseman’s version of the play, which he produced for the Comédie Française in the Théatre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris.

This year, IDFA is paying particular attention to the theme Niet Normaal (Abnormal) in a special program in collaboration with the art event to begin on December 16, 2009 in the Beurs van Berlage. In it, international artists respond to a topical social issue: what is normal and who decides? The IDFA program includes 11 recent documentaries about people who, for various reasons, do not lead a normal life. The program also explores the ethical boundaries of the desire to be normal.

De Open Stad is also a theme of the festival program. Each of the documentaries in this program is located in a large city, such as Peking, Mumbai and Bogota, which are dealing with the various problems and challenges arising from global urbanisation.

Each year, IDFA’s Doc Lab presents a program that explores the relationship between new media and documentaries. The festival will include a selection of films and web-documentaries, installations, live presentations and meetings, taking place at participating cinemas and elsewhere. This year’s theme is Live Stories. These are documentaries whose narrative is not entirely pre-determined and the maker continues to exert influence over the outcome of the story during its presentation.

Doc Lab’s special guest this year is Ira Glass, the radio producer. The radio version of his documentary program This American Life (there is also a television version) draws more 1.8 million listeners each week and has won almost every non-fiction prize in existence since it started in 1995. The bizarre, moving and superb documentary stories that Glass presents during his weekly radio show have already inspired a dozen feature films (the most recent being The Informant, with Matt Damon). During his afternoon lecture, Glass will explain how he brings a story to life on the radio and how, using the correct techniques, a minor anecdote can be transformed into a grand and engaging documentary story. For a complete overview of all Doc Lab’s activities, locations and projects, see: www.idfa.nl/doclab.

The productions screened in the Workshop Results program came about thanks to the IDFA Documentary Workshop. This year the program comprises four documentaries.

IDFA TV is IDFA’s online documentary channel. Visitors to the IDFA website (www.idfa.nl) can view around 40 complete documentaries from the festival archive, free of charge. They include Hair India and Necrobusiness (the films that feature in this year’s IDFA commercials). There is also a selection of the best films made in the past with grants from the Jan Vrijman Fund, IDFA’s fund for filmmakers in developing countries. Furthermore, visitors to IDFA TV can view video reportages, trailers, IDFA commercials and complete recordings of IDFA events, all year round. The number of complete films available online will increase significantly in coming years.

Other programs include:

Educational programs for students, in which special early-morning screenings will be held for schools.

IDFA’s Documentary Workshop, an annual event organized in cooperation with the Dutch Cultural Media Fund. The goal is to create a film treatment for a 50-minute documentary which will be produce/co-produced and broadcast by one of the Netherlands’ public broadcasting services.

IDFAcademy, a carefully compiled training program for film students and promising young filmmakers from all over the world.

Each year, IDFA organises the FORUM, an international co-financing market where independent producers pitch documentary projects to international broadcasting corporations such as the BBC, ARTE, ZDF, Al Jazeera and ITUS, as well as all public broadcasting services in the Netherlands. This year, 42 projects have been selected from 27 different countries. The FORUM will be held from November 23 to 25 in the Compagnie Theatre, Amsterdam.

IDFA has grown from an institution organising an annual film festival into a platform involved in screening, making and discussing creative documentaries. Together, IDFA, Docs for Sale, the FORUM and the Jan Vrijman Fund form a centre for documentary film that is unparalleled anywhere in the world. These four organisations attract more than 2000 representatives from the international field to Amsterdam.

For more information, visit www.idfa.nl.

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