The interview with King below has been lightly edited.

How did you happen on this story?

“It started with a conversation with Patricia. We were talking about her work. At the time, she’d been working on a project about fakes, forgeries, misinformation. So one of the things that really got my attention is that she essentially said that she’d been to a talk where they said they thought 40000 people in Kenya were writing and the writing work they were doing was for other people in the Global North. They had sort of described it as fake. For me, the first question was: how do real people write fake essays? Secondly, I thought I needed to understand more about it. It was fascinating.”

In the documentary, you include bits of Kingori’s life. Was that always the plan?  

“It evolved over time. When we began filming at the very beginning, it was all focused on the writers. The focus expanded during the Covid ban and Patricia got the honour of being awarded the youngest black professor at Oxford. And it felt to me that, at least that would give us confidence in saying, this person really is an expert in what they’re doing. She is also intrinsically connected to this story in terms of her own heritage. We have known each other for a long time and there was a real comfort in saying: why don’t we explore this together? Why don’t we look at this as a relationship between you, the writers and then education as a whole?”

The Shadow Scholars shows the invisible writers (even if their faces are obscured) back in Kenya and not the ordinarily visible students in the west. Was this reversal a conscious decision?

“I think it was a really conscious decision from two aspects. Firstly, I think often there just isn’t enough space…how do we make space for the people who aren’t often seen and aren’t brought into screens and given visibility? I think Alice Diop calls it cinema of reparations. How do we allow an opportunity to bring marginalised groups into our films and allow them to have the agency and be the drivers of a narrative?  I always really wanted the writers at the center of the story.”

“One of the real questions that we had ideologically was: who is really in the shadows? The students that we feature only in voice represent millions of people who are handing in work they haven’t written themselves. Their clients don’t know who they are when they eventually get into the labor force. So, I think in some ways what I wanted to do is really underlie that aspect of the story. Also, there’s an ominous sense in having people surround us who we don’t know don’t have the qualifications to be doing what they do.”

How did you approach shooting the scenes in Kenya?

“One of the things I really wanted was a sense of intimacy and closeness, and so you’ll notice that even though we’ve ended up having to use AI to cover their faces, we’re often, quite close. We are in their homes. You’re quite close to seeing emotions across their faces. I really wanted scenes that we had to show the Kenya that I was seeing. The country has got an amazing sort of texture of light, hasn’t it?”

As you said, the film uses AI as a disguise for the writers. Was that the plan from the start?

“It was a really difficult decision. It actually wasn’t until really late in our process that it was decided. Three years into filming, two days before our last shoot, we had a conversation about the ethics of how we were showing them the duty of care and the legalities around it. What happened and emerged over time was that there were crackdowns in Australia and then in the UK. By 2023, it was a really different context. Writing academic essays for other people was banned from those countries, which added a potential for criminal prosecution.”

“We believe that they deserve us to be seen and for the world to understand these incredibly intelligent people. We had a conversation with our legal experts again and at this point, they said, actually we think that some of the risks of repercussions have become a little bit higher and that this is something that we need to take really seriously. That was the point that we decided that we were going to not identify them.”

“However, we had shot the entire film. I went back and totally rewrote the film that also meant kind of an adjustment in terms of how much screen time people could have. How much other aspects of their lives were shown because we had to take really seriously what identification could mean. What we finally did was inspired by Welcome to Chechnya.”

Is there a part of the moral blame that could go to the Kenyans writing these essays?

“The benefit and the pass grade or fail can only go to the student. And so, the implication of the relationship only falls on the student, so it’s difficult to engage that third party in the moralising when they don’t stand to gain or lose.”

But they get cash, right?

“Yes. But Ngugi wa Thiong’o [interviewed in the film] gives this example of the way in which there has been a sort of historic extraction of ideas and labor [by the global north]. It is something that’s gone on for a really long time.”

Final question. What’s next for you?

“I would like to make sure that any acknowledgement for the film may directly benefit the writers, so we’re really open to any opportunities to enable pipelines or pathway discussions.”

How will that work?

“It would be amazing to see whether or not institutions want to discuss whether there would be opportunities for people in Kenya who are obviously incredibly capable. I think that would definitely be welcome and exciting. What the film does is disprove any kind of superiority or supremacy of Global North academic institutions and the values they hold. What these writers have shown is that they have the entrepreneurial instincts to be able to liberate themselves financially and from the shadow of being a people who are inherently reliant on others to lead them. They have shown themselves incredibly capable of thought leadership.”

“Our parents were naïve,” says one. “They were idiots,” says the other.

It hardly matters which one of them is right. The women themselves laugh at the end of this exchange, as though saying, what’s past is past. For at least one of them, the titular Hawa, the present comes across as more important. She wants to learn to read and write. She also wants much better for her kids, one of whom is Najiba Noori, the film’s director.

But when the film opens, Hawa lives in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital city that’s famous for a few reasons, none of which include a penchant for encouraging the freedom of its women. Indeed, the perniciousness of patriarchy and its female victims are the film’s target. The synopsis provided by IDFA foregrounds Hawa’s quest for literacy but Noori’s film has broader concerns.

Covering a particularly troubled time in Kabul, the film situates Noori’s family’s issues within the culture and politics of Afghanistan. On the home-front, one of Hawa’s grandkids has escaped from her father and come to live with her grandmother. On the national level, the U.S., which had contributed to the country’s chaos, is on the verge of fleeing.

“We all lost Afghanistan,” Noori says. She credits her mother with making sure that she escaped the strictures of her country. While her mother was forced into marrying as a kid, both women are scared that the escapee grandchild will meet the same fate. What to do about it?

There just isn’t a lot to do when the laws and customs of the land are firmly not on your side. So, if Writing Hawa was the product of fiction, the film could reasonably be expected to figure out a solution, at least, to the possibility of Hawa’s grandkid marrying an older man while still in her teens. But in a country where someone over the radio says, “European feminism uses women’s rights as an excuse to force women to go naked, thereby exposing them to rape and violence” viewers shouldn’t expect a heroic triumph.

Still, there are moments where the narrative is leavened occasionally by humour, some of which are quite grim—as is the case when Hawa cracks a joke on the Taliban not wasting their bullets on old people like her and her mentally ailing husband.

At less than 90 minutes, Writing Hawa is a rather slight project, something Noori appears to concede right at the start of the film when she says she had to abandon the film she was making of her mother’s life. In essence, the film that has reached IDFA and, soon, other festivals, is a dream truncated. It’s unfortunate since Ma Hawa is a very compelling presence on the screen.

And yet, the truncated nature of the film is an unfortunate metaphor for Afghanistan itself. The country should be more, and known for more than its conflicts. It’s not. One can imagine a version of Writing Hawa with more Hawa would attract viewers outside those who are big fans of documentaries. The fall of Kabul has robbed audiences of a fuller experience of Noori’s project.

Director: Najiba Noori
Co-director: Rasul Noori
Screenplay: Najiba Noori, Afsaneh Salari
Producer: Christian Popp for Tag Film
Co-producer: Hasse van Nunen for Een van de jongens, Renko Douze for Een van de jongens
Cinematography: Najiba Noori, Rasul Noori
Editing: Afsaneh Salari
Sound Design: Tim van Peppen
Music: Afshin Azizi
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In Arabic
84 minutes

For many migrants seeking to go to Europe through the Sahara, Agadez is the last port before Libya, a country one might call the last African stand for the immigrant dreaming of a better life in Europe. This, of course, means that the EU is interested in the area.

On The Border—a new documentary directed by Gerald Igor Hauzenberger and Gabriela Schild and showing in competition at IDFA—presents the current situation in the region as mediated by some of its own people. Tilla Amadou is a radio presenter. Ahmed Dizzi is an old salesman visited by tragedy but with a clear memory of his homeland’s better days. Rhissa Feltou is a politician who used to be mayor. All three are highly telegenic presences, which probably means Hauzenberger and Schild worked hard at getting these subjects or were incredibly lucky.

Whatever the case, the directors know what great assets they have, as they allow these deeply knowledgeable men and woman to explain what is ailing Agadez. Depending on your interpretation of the issues, the problem began with migrants who discovered the Agadez route and bombarded the place, or it began with the Europeans who have tried to stop the migrants from even embarking on the journey to Libya.

Not long after learning that the city had become popular with migrants, the EU worked out an arrangement with the Niger government that would see harsh treatment visited on both the fleeing migrant and those who helped her on the next stage of the journey. This action pretty much crumbled one of the mainstays of the Agadez economy as people formerly employed by the informal migrant transportation industry became unemployed. In the aftermath, drugs, joblessness, and crime rose. It didn’t help that the area’s tourism economy had been killed off by the Tuareg rebellion in the late 2000s.

In one scene, showing a meeting with people in the community and a pen-wielding European representative, the source of the issues is presented by an older woman who receives applause. But it is not quite clear if—or what—the European will do subsequently.

It is quite understandable if the EU is clueless as to what to do. Its main interest in the area is the prevention of migration through that porous border. It bargained with the Nigerien government to get its wishes attended to: for setting up the harsher policies, the African country was given a hunk of cash.

It is the kind of thing that happens when an organisation throws money to fix a problem that time and more strategic thought might have solved. For their part, the Nigerien government seems to have ceded its own responsibility to anyone but themselves.

In one scene, Feltou, the politician, visits another political leader and asks why the environment is unkempt. There is no real response. Very conspicuously, this other leader has given up. A brutal desert has been deserted by its own leadership.

The filmmakers do not intervene onscreen on attempt to draw connections; they just let the people they’ve chosen as subjects tell the story of their city. They also allow the visuals, which as ironies go are frequently beautiful, say what isn’t said. But for the viewer alert to subtext, part of the problem of Agadez (and other African cities and countries) can be summed up in a leadership that has given up on its responsibilities without leaving the position that has earned them a lofty status in their communities. They show trees covered in plastic that stalls their growth and one of their subjects deploys it as a political metaphor. This is very good political filmmaking.

It is also a very engaging work, even for those who have no dog in this fight. And that’s because cinematographer Thomas Eirich-Schneider makes some beautiful images out of the desert. But, above all else, On The Border is a project with a potentially significant draw outside of festivals and classrooms because the directors have gotten astute middlemen as mediators.

So, maybe therein lies a trick other European filmmakers can imbibe when filming nonfiction outside of their continent: allow the (smart and interested) locals tell their own story. The result of that decision in On The Border is quietly spectacular.

In 2021, that area became a source of consternation for organisations invested in human rights because both countries were turning back refugees, leaving them in migratory limbo. A year later, Lydia Gall of Human Rights Watch had tough words for Poland, a country unsurprisingly considered as the less belligerent of the bordering countries. “It’s unacceptable that an EU country is forcing people, many fleeing war and oppression, back into what can only be described as hellish conditions in Belarus,” she said.

Solakiewicz and Portnoy take us into the fear and (often literal) trembling at the heart of the zone through the experiences of Maciek, a Polish man living with his family on the Poland side of the border, and Alhyder, a Syrian refugee who comes to live with Maciek, following the likely buffeting from authorities on both sides of the border.

Naturally, there is some danger involved. There’s also some skepticism: a member of Maciek’s family wonders if the newcomer has come with a bomb? Maybe he’ll blow up the household that has shown him kindness? The biggest question, though, is not quite as explosive: What happens after Alhyder attains some sort of mental and physical stability? Where does he go to from here?

The documentary’s directors don’t appear too concerned with those questions. As it was with 15 Corners of the World, their work here is largely one of intimacy. Faces fill the screen and a lot of the action is confined to the house inhabited by the host and his guest. This is the kind of documentary where its behind the scenes decision-making might prove to be just as engaging as the documentary itself, if not more.

To ramp up the tension that is inbuilt for a story featuring a siege of sorts—soldiers are around the Maciek’s apartment—some parts of The Guest deploy a sound design that wouldn’t feel out of place in a thriller. But the action is pretty much limited to a lot of talk between the men at the centre of the tale, both of whom speak different languages, broken English being their common tongue. What makes it clear that the stakes here are higher than your average domestic drama is the kind of conversations and over-the-phone negotiations one imagines regular people don’t have. Take, for example, a scene where the economics of smuggling humans across the border is broached. We learn that the smuggler will not go on what must be a tricky journey if his cargo is a single person. To make the trip make sense, he will need to ferry four people across.

All of this adds up to make The Guest a sobering tale of the high stakes of war even for those not directly involved in combat. One imagines that fleeing Syria might have brought relief to the refugee but Poland’s refusal to grant access and the subsequent pushback to Belarus must be retraumatising. What Solakiewicz and Portnoy have done is to locate the grace and gratitude that is still possible in a circumstance as tragic as war. It is good advertisement for humanity. But it is also a recipe for unavoidable staidness. This, after all, is a film that goes into the woods when it is not within an apartment holding only a handful of ordinary people, none of whom are particularly charismatic characters—not that charisma is the one thing required during a war.

There is, however, a few notes of lightness. One comes after Alhyder, whose face transmits gratitude alloyed with awkwardness, gets a haircut as a disguise. “New man!” Maciek calls out. “Maybe Italiano, maybe Spain.” And just before the film closes, Alhyder expresses his worry about his host, which Maciek dismisses. In sweet broken English, the guest queries his host’s seeming recklessness, “I am inside problem. You outside problem. Why you go inside problem?”

It is a rare moment of candour in the film, which, without Al Jazeera as co-producers, might have limited appeal outside of very European festivals and a very small audience. But Portnoy and Solakiewicz probably knew that already.

It is an extreme close-up of one small section from a photograph that was shared on social media in December of 2023. The complete image depicts a camp in Gaza, where civilians are treated inhumanely. Pennell’s film examines this image, interrogating its various components through a roving frame that punches in on barely distinguishable details, questioning both their implications and their composition. By thoroughly probing this single image of barbaric violence, that would have been scrolled past on thousands of timelines, Man Number 4 raises uncomfortable questions about our complicity in violence through the passive consumption of such startling media.

The film’s imagery is accompanied by a voiceover, delivered by British artist John Smith – whose own short film, Being John Smith is also playing at IDFA and reviewed here. The narration continually refers to “you,” the viewer. You look something up on the internet, you have trouble understanding what it is you’re looking at,  you wonder what is in the box. The visuals follow a mouse icon as it hovers over and drags around photograph that consumes the screen. This film is an accusation, a confrontation with the role we all play in a hyperconnected contemporary society, an unwavering finger that reaches out and points at us from the screen.

The nature of Man Number 4’s narrative progression, through which it reveals more and more specifics both from within and about the creation of the image. The intention here is less to mimic the detective work of the likes of Forensic Architecture and instead to question in the very nature of the image, and as such encourage us to do the same. Our attention is drawn to artificial light – “you wonder about the unseen photographer” – and the various lines of power that are drawn by the photograph’s inception and its distribution. The horror of the entire image is inarguable, but Pennell’s film is more of a horrific reflection that we might find it more difficult to accept.

Director, screenplay: Miranda Pennell
Narration: John Smith
Sound: Philippe Ciompi
Venue: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) (Paradocs)
In English
10 minutes

Mostly shot by Carten from a first-person hand-held viewpoint, the loose central thread in A Want in Her is the director’s relationship with her mother Nula, a volatile love-hate bond which both interrogate on screen with sometimes painful honesty, their conversations switching between English and Irish language. Summoned back to her native corner of rural Ireland on an urgent mercy mission after Nula goes missing, Carten has to navigate not just police, doctors and social workers, but also the simmering long-term tensions between her uncles Kevin and Danny, who have barely spoken for 20 years. The highly strung Kevin now lives in the old family home, which is in ramshackle condition, while the sickly and resentful Danny sleeps in a shockingly squalid wooden cabin on the grounds. Since they refuse to communicate directly, Carten has to play go-between between the two. This is not a happy family.

Using a purposely jumbled mosaic of archive home video, contemporary footage, recorded phone calls and self-consciously staged scenes, Carten slowly fills in the tortuous back story to Nula’s ongoing issues with addiction and mental health, rehab and relapse. These appear to stem from her own mother’s sudden death, and the bitter wrangling over who should inherit the house she left behind, compounded by unbearable grief when several of Nula’s siblings died within a short space of time. A Want in Her captures just one of their funerals, but death seems to hover over this entire story, just out of shot.

Carten has clearly been an aspiring film director from childhood, peppering A Want in Her with family video snippets from her pre-teen years, some staged and charmingly amateurish, others more random clips of domestic reportage. These scratchy lo-fi flashbacks serve as a rich resource for this story, showing us not just the roots of Carten’s life as an artist and film-maker but also heartbreaking proof of her mother’s former life as a glamorous, confident, intelligent, mentally stable social worker. They reinforce the sense of a formerly happy family now in tragic freefall.

Judged by the conventions of documentary journalism, A Want in Her falls short. It appears that most of the footage was shot between 2018 and 2020, but Carten’s impressionistic collage approach means that dates, locations and sequencing remain opaque throughout the film, confusingly so at times. According to her IDFA press notes, the director initially considered adding an explanatory voice-over, but ultimately to let the audio clips from pre-recorded phone calls with family, police and health workers tell the story instead. This bold stylistic decision works in terms of immediate context but lacks deeper historical background. A little more family hinterland would have enriched this story’s emotional impact.

But as an example of how to make a strikingly original aesthetic statement from wrenchingly personal material, A Want in Her is consistently compelling and impressive. Carten creates a compelling effect by jump-cutting between observational reportage, semi-abstract visual details, majestic footage of the rugged Irish landscape, and more stylised framing devices, including some of her video artworks, many of which feature Nula playing a version of her real self. One performance-based snippet even features the director miming along to her mother’s words, which is both unsettling and moving.

Music and sound are also strong stylistic elements. Clarice Jensen’s austere cello-based score leans into Carten’s more experimental aesthetic, while tracks by contemporary Irish avant-folk group Lankum and modish Dublin alt-rockers Fontaines DC help bring a welcome sense of emotional crescendo to the film’s finale, even though this dysfunctional family psychodrama is still a long way from closure by the time the end credits roll.

Director: Myrid Carten
Cinematography: Myrid Carten, Donna Wade, Seán Mullan
Editing: Karen Harley
Music: Clarice Jensen
Sound design: Morgan Muse
Producers: Tadhg O’Sullivan, Roisín Geraghty
Production company: Inland Films (Ireland)
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In English, Irish
81 minutes

In early 2022, an eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano in the Tongan archipelago caused tsunamis across the southern Pacific Ocean. Its afterglow also lit up the mountains of the central eastern ranges of Australia, as depicted in Malena Szlam’s documentary film. Combining imagery of these illuminated peaks with other visuals of the surrounding landscapes from the Gondwana Rainforest to Mount Beerwah, Szlam conjures a beguiling sense of the landscape’s deep history and the geological forces – not unlike the eruption – that originally shaped it. The eponymous Bunya Mountains were themselves the result of volcanic activity millions of years ago.

Szlam’s deployment of overlaid footage using in-camera multiple-exposures, creates a visual manifestation of spatial and temporal movement within the landscape. On some occasions these are implied – two shots of the same outcropping are framed someone askew, implying the slow drift of the mountain across the screen, carried by tectonic shifts. At other times, a still and serene panorama is set against a panning shot that makes the movement feel literal and happening before your eyes. In other instances, still, the shake of the camera and the flicker of the shutter forge a febrile energy that emanates from the rocks. Further still, the images of the mountains cast aglow by the remnants of recent volcanic activity puts the impact of such activity into sharp relief.

The film’s intensely felt evocations are partly due to the incredible soundscapes created by the Australian artist Lawrence English, to which Szlam sets her images to. These include the teeming chirrups of forest life, to other less tangible audio that suggests the slow grind of shifting rocks and earth. Archipelago of Earthen Bones flattens time, to bring deep history into the present, but it also flattens the nature of our planet, combining the life that exist on the landscape with the geology itself. Szlam’s film might be wordless, and intentional unexplained, but it has a rumbling elemental power that is difficult to resist.

Director, producer, cinematography, editing: Malena Szlam
Sound: Lawrence English
Sales: Malena Szlam (Chile/Canada)
Venue: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) (Competition for Short Documentary)
No dialogue
20 minutes

Even before he signed up for military service, immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Crimea-born Sentsov had a dramatic back story as a political prisoner and award-winning human rights hero. In 2014, after Putin illegally annexed Crimea, the director was arrested by FSB agents and tried by occupying forces on trumped-up terrorism charges. He was sentenced to 20 years in an Arctic penal colony, a decision denounced by Amnesty and the global film community, from Ken Loach and Pedro Almodovar to Russian directors Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexander Sokurov. Following a five-month hunger strike in 2018, he was released under a prisoner exchange in September 2019. For the last six months, on breaks between frontline battle duty, he has been promoting Real on the film festival circuit.

Since it premiered at Karlovy Vary in June, Real has screened in Warsaw, Stockholm, IDFA and other film festivals. How is it being received?

“A good success, I would say. We have to take into consideration the very low expectations I had here. This was footage accidentally captured on my GoPro camera that I first wanted to delete. And yet this it has been so well-received, and various critics write numerous very positive reviews. This is the footage that I even did not want to make a movie by itself, but it became a movie somehow.”

“We also had a very special screening back in Kyiv during the Kyiv Festival of Critics. We were able to invite the soldiers who participated in that battle, and their fellow soldiers. Every screening is very important to me, and of course, it’s very interesting how western audiences are touched and moved by this movie. This was not expected. But besides that, the other main target audience that was very important to me is the soldiers participating in the battles, who are in the front line, how they would perceive the movie. They really like it. They said, when they watch it, it basically takes them back to that moment.”

Real is a snapshot of a tragic day in the 2023 counteroffensive against Russia, with high casualties and chaotic communication. You have also been critical of Ukrainian battlefield tactics in recent months. Have Ukraine’s military command responded to the film?

“I did not ask for permission to make this film because it would probably not be possible. Ukraine is a very bureaucratic country, so it might go on and on for a long time. I really doubt I would ever get it. So I did it based on my own conscience my own risk, but still considering all the levels of responsibility and possible consequences that could be there. I also knew that I’m not disclosing any military secrets, zero. Also all the people who’ve been participating in that battle give me permission to do this.”

Do you consider Real to be anti-war film?

“Any movie about about war, in origin, is an anti-war movie. Because anyone who ever been at the war, who lost friends in war, who has been in active battles, who observed all the suffering in the war, would do anything possible to make sure that this war would not happen, So considering that fact, I would say any movie about the war could be called an anti-war movie. But this movie was not made to show people all the horrifying facts of the war. It was more just to show ordinary people what it means to be in the war, what the soldiers could observe, how they behave, the certain levels of communication happening there. It’s not about making everyone feel terrified, it is just about the real stuff that is happening there. I’m definitely not one of those pacifist directors who have been denying the war, calling to stop the war, making these big slogans and everything. I’m one of those who, when the war began, took the weapon in my own hands and started to defend my country, because this is the war for our survival.

Real was shot 18 months ago, and obviously the war has changed significantly since then, even in the five months since it premiered. Donald Trump has also been re-elected as US president, claiming he can end the conflict in 24 hours. How do you feel today about Ukraine’s prospects?

“Of course, after all this time, there are certain difficulties, and those difficulties are not a big secret. There are some internal problems inside the country. There is a problem with the Ukrainian support because it’s very normal that after to three years of active battles, any support would be fading. And of course, the elections in the United States could create a complete reset. That is is something that is going to impact the situation profoundly.”

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently predicted that Donald Trump’s administration will end the war sooner, and the two have reportedly discussed various peace plans. Do you believe Trump will prove positive or negative for Ukraine?

“Of course, we all know he promised this speedy process of getting this war to its solution, but no one really know what he means. But we have to remember that Putin is the only one who can end this war. Additionally, Trump also said he wants to end this war from the position of strong power, whatever that means. Remember there are not many tools or leverage that can be used against Putin. He is the only one who can end this war. That’s his own decision. Of course, Trump might create the conditions for that, but he’s not the one who will decide. Only Putin will decide what he wants to do, because he started this war.”

This war does seem to be Putin’s personal project. If he died tomorrow, would that instantly mean an end to hostilities?

“If it’s really going to happen and Putin will die tomorrow, then it’s going to be big holiday, and we probably will celebrate this for three days! People will give out free borscht in New York again to everyone, the same story as when Stalin died. Ha! We can dream. But if Putin would die, or would be removed from power, that is also optional, it’s not only the death of Putin that could change everything. If he is removed from power it would also be a big component in all this. That will help develop certain conditions and create a reset inside Russia that might lead to a situation when this war would be potentially resolved. Because the war we have right now, it’s very much Putin’s obsession. But that doesn’t take responsibility off every Russian that in any way actively participates in this war, who support Putin or supports this war, or even off those who stay silent all this time. It’s all their responsibility as well.”

You were one of the first film-makers to call for a global boycott of Russian-made films since the invasion, but some Ukrainian industry figures have argued that critical Russian dissident voices should still be given a platform. Do you believe in a blanket ban or a mixed approach?

“For me, it’s very clear. People of Russian regions who have been anti-Putin and anti-regime for many years, who usually reside at the moment somewhere in Europe, and make movies with independent funds: they definitely should be allowed, they should be able to show their position. But we have to be very careful of distinguishing this from the products of those directors or producers still living in Russia, who are still taking money from the Russian government, even through different shadow cultural funds, even those who are still through different channels co-operating with Russian authorities and producing these pro-Russian, pro-Kremlin narratives. Those those movies should be cancelled. “

“I would give the very clear example here. For example, Alkold Kurov, who is a famous documentary director, he was living in Russia until the very last moment. He was trying to be there because he was doing a very important job showing people inside Russia how freedom of speech is oppressed, How Novaya Gazeta, this island of freedom of speech, was closed in Russia. He made a movie about the rights of gay people in Chechnya and how they are badly treated there. He made a movie about how protests inside Russia were oppressed by the government. Now he left Russia. He’s well received in a cinema community, no one would dare to stand against him or say something against him.”

“The different example would be the movie director, who does not even have a Russian passport any more. She was travelling with Russian soldiers in the frontline for three months, and then made a movie Russians in War spreading the narrative that all these are ordinary Russians, ordinary poor people who have been sent to war. They try to make this sound equal between Ukrainians and Russians. But it’s really false argument because you could never put an equal sign between those people who came to kill you and those who’ve been violently killed by you. It’s victim and aggressor. How could someone spend three months on the frontline with Russian soldiers without the knowledge of FSB or Russian special agencies? FSB would never, ever let anyone spend three months on the battlefield. They would detect that person and kill them, or put them in a prison in two days time. That is just impossible. This is why Ukraine will keep calling for the cancelling of certain cultural products, because the Putin regime is using this soft power just to project itself as not that evil. Ukraine learned this the hard way. First you get Russian language, then a certain territory, then you get Russian culture there, then Russian tanks came to protect all that.”

Looking beyond your current military duties, are you hoping to direct films again soon?

“I definitely want to go back to the film-making process. I am at the frontline and in the military just because I have to be there right now, to protect my country. If there would be no Ukraine, there would be no Ukrainian movies. That’s very clear for me. But eventually, this war is not going to be endless. It will end one day, and I’m sure there will be a moment for me to go back to making movies. I have many plans, and one of those plans is also making the movie about this war. I actually have plans together with my partner and producer, Denis Ivanov, to make a movie in 2026. And so next year we will look for the funding for that. We had a plan to do this before the full-scale invasion, we wanted to start in 2022, but of course it’s been delayed for many years. In the next year or two, maybe there would not be end of the war, but probably some break, or just a bit more stable than this active fighting right now. Because that level of intensity is not going to last forever.”

Dissecting the high cost of political resistance, Abo Zaabal 89 is a remarkable achievement and  a strong addition to Arab cinema this year. It should easily find its way to international film festivals with a political orientation and to countries with a high number of Arab exiles.

On a hot summer night in August 1989, Bassam’s father, Mahmoud Mortada, was imprisoned and tortured at the infamous Abo Zaabal prison alongside 52 other socialist activists, during a crackdown on workers’ strikes. Shortly after his release, Mahmoud, broken and disillusioned, left Egypt for Vienna, abandoning his family in the process. His departure left Bassam, then only five years old, in the care of his mother, Fardous, a resilient socialist activist who carried the burden of raising her son while grappling with her own trauma and illness. These unresolved fractures form the backbone of Bassam’s film as he courageously seeks to bridge the emotional chasm that has long divided his family.

Through interviews with his parents, friends, and fellow activists, Bassam pieces together fragments of their shared past. Particularly haunting are the cassette recordings Mahmoud sent from Vienna, which Bassam revisits, infusing them with reconstructed memories and flashbacks. These tapes, once a lifeline between father and son, now serve as an unflinching mirror to their fractured relationship, forcing questions about betrayal, guilt, and resilience. Bassam’s mother, who could not afford the luxury of breaking down or walking away as Mahmoud did, emerges as the film’s stoic anchor, her anger and disappointment underscoring the depth of her sacrifices.

In many ways, Bassam is like his father. Both have been defeated in their dreams and aspirations. Bassem is one of the millions of young people who participated in and believed in peaceful democratic change during the 2011 Arab Spring, a progressive, pro-democracy, left-leaning movement that was severely defeated, leaving many people dead or in prison. His father, too, was frustrated and defeated after getting out of prison, especially after a worker he fought to get elected to parliament switched sides to the ruling party.

Abou Zaabal 99 transcends being just a film about trauma in a dysfunctional family, putting all the director’s skills as a filmmaker to the test. Maged Nader’s camera captures the warm cinematic reenactment of his early family life: his mother preparing fried fish to give to his father during a prison visit, mixed with other reenacted scenes of his father in prison being beaten and tortured by the police.

Abo Zaabal, the notorious site of Mahmoud’s torture, is symbolically and physically reconstructed in the film, serving as both a literal and metaphorical space for Bassam’s inquiry into his father’s pain. This act of reconstruction is central to the documentary’s thematic ambition: by recreating the past, Bassam seeks not only to understand the trauma his father endured, but also to confront his own feelings of alienation and resentment.

The film is as much a testament to collective suffering as it is a critique of political oppression. By intertwining the personal with the political, Abo Zaabal 89 reflects on how Egypt’s turbulent history has shaped the intimate dynamics of its citizens. Bassam’s attempt to reconcile with his father mirrors a broader struggle to reconcile with a generation of activists who sacrificed everything for ideals that often remained unfulfilled. The reconciliation with the father is an attempt to understand himself.

Briefly mentioned in passing is the fate of the Iron and Steel Factory, site of Bassem’s father’s protest to defend a worker: it  has been forcefully closed by the current Egyptian government and sold to be turned into shopping malls and gated communities. The symbolism is devastating.

Visually, the film employs a rich tapestry of archival footage, found materials, and dramatic monologues. A theatrical performance by Sayyed Ragab, Mahmoud’s best friend and fellow activist, becomes a particularly moving narrative device, bridging the personal and historical with the actor’s raw vulnerability. The use of newspaper archives and photographs further contextualizes the film’s personal narrative within the broader socio-political landscape of Egypt in the late 20th century.

In the end, Abo Zaabal 89 is more than a film about familial estrangement or the scars of political activism. It is an act of healing, a reclamation of history, and a meditation on the enduring complexities of love and loss. Bassam Mortada offers a profoundly brave work, making the private public in a way that invites universal empathy. This bravery extend to the very act of making a film in Egypt about political activists, torture, and political oppression. As a filmmaker, Bassam is no stranger to courage, being one of the founders of the video journalism department at the privately owned Al-Masry Al-Youm, once an alternative voice critical of the police.

The film’s ability to traverse time and space, moving from the shadowy corridors of a Cairo prison to the quiet isolation of exile in Vienna, underscores its power and significance. The film had its world premiere in the Cairo Opera House, a mile from Tahrir Square where the filmmaker, his mother and his father have been protesting since the 1970s, demonstrating against corruption, torture and oppression, and calling for labour rights. Now heavily militarized by the police, Tahrir Square today stands witness to defeated revolutions and crushed dreams.

Director, screenplay: Bassam Mortada
Production: Kesmat Elsayed for See Media Production, Anke Petersen for Joyti Films,
Kesmat Elsayed for SEERA Film GmbH
Co-production: Anke Petersen for Joyti Films, Anna Chester for JYOTI Film GmbH
Executive producer: Kesmat Elsayed
Cinematography: Maged Nader
Editing: Ahmad abo el fadl
Sound Design: Daniel Wulf, Philipp X
Music: Rami Abadir, Omar Elabd
Screenplay: Bassam Mortada
Venue: Cairo International Film Festival, International Critic’s Week
83 min

Obviously, a key distinction concerns consent. The Nigerian Prince isn’t exactly looking to make his victim’s life better. By contrast, the “contract cheater” is engaged in an activity that is supposed to propel his client to the next step as a person and/or as a professional. In King’s telling, the men and women who engage in this sub-legal activity are not criminals. They are brilliant people who have figured out a way to eke out a living in Kenya, a country that doesn’t have jobs for its graduates.

King herself doesn’t appear on the screen. Her surrogate is the Oxford professor Patricia Kingori, upon whose research the documentary is based. Kingori is a warm presence on the screen and it is a cool coup that King gets her to join the film. In a film populated by invisible Africans, it is a boon that this one successful African is very visible. It is also very much an inspired choice that, in a reversal of the world inhabited by these writers and their clients, only the Kenyans are shown. We hear chiefly from the clients through onscreen text and via audio recordings. Kingori, as an onscreen middleman, mediates between both parties, although her loyalties are clear: she is very interested in the workings of the Kenyan community of shadows.

She leads the viewer into that community, members of which have their faces disguised using AI. This becomes the film’s only acknowledgment of the not-quite-legal nature of the work these contractors are engaged in. Otherwise, The Shadow Scholars is a valorisation of these anonymous people. Which, from a moral standpoint, is problematic. But that is only a part of the problem of the politics of The Shadow Scholars.

At one point, Kingori says, “If the writers were writing as themselves and getting those opportunities as themselves, it will completely reshape the world”. It is an interesting statement that is followed up with one of the contract writers saying, “We are way better than those we are writing for.”

Clever editing aside, that is a rather delusional statement. But the film is structured in such a way that some viewers might end up agreeing with this opinion.

There is no doubt that these Kenyan writers are great at figuring out what Western examiners want to see, but to suggest that they are superior to those they are writing for is at best patronising or, at worst, silly. Essay writing may be hard but it is just one part of what it means to be an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or, who knows, a rocket scientist. There are hours spent in labs using equipment that very few Africans have ever seen, there are days spent in classrooms talking to lecturers, there are the wonderful interactions that a campus provides — all of these are necessary parts of what it takes to be a graduate and, eventually, a professional. You write a paper “in partial fulfillment of the requirements”.

King and Kingori, who is as academic as anyone could ever hope to be, know this. But there is no pushback in the choices the film makes. And so, a large part of the story ends up as part of an ongoing crusade that brings together the guilt-ridden liberal and the model minority seeking to elevate their home country.

Both can be well-meaning but good intentions have no real connection to truth. And truth in this case is simple: both the shadow scholar and the actual student scholar are engaged in unethical activity. Everything else is merely cosmetic — or academic — if the filmmaker and her professorial subject do not address the foundational problem: why is writing invisibly for a Western student more attractive than getting a job in Kenya? And if there are no jobs in Kenya, why is that the case?

To answer these questions is to look at the Kenyan state and poke it in the eye with the truth: the government has failed its youth. Colonialism has its consequences but the UK is not the immediate reason East Africa is failing its young people.

Also, for a documentary that gives us a lot of numbers — the industry is worth billions; about 50,000 people are engaged in this activity, etc. — why isn’t there a consideration of the platforms that make academic essay writing possible? Social media platforms where some of these services are advertised are worth billions of dollars. Upwork, a place where essay writers can connect with their clients, had freelancer bills reaching a billion dollars in 2017.

A weighty exploration of the economics of contract cheating will have to ask one question: Why aren’t any of the biggest platforms owned and operated by Africans based in Africa? You can argue, as the documentary does, that shadow scholars are the brains behind some of the successful university graduates in the US, UK, and Europe, but if their brains haven’t led them to figure out how to earn the most value from their brilliance, then asking why is a good idea.

One-half of the answer will surely lead to accounting for how the world of entrepreneurship is shaped in favour of already rich countries. The other half will point the filmmaker and her subject to the complicity of African leadership in failing to create an atmosphere where its horde of brilliant people can direct their own economic destinies on its own platforms. You get the sense watching The Shadow Scholars that only the first half of that answer is worthy of consideration. In this case, the documentary, as important as it is, is the sort that has chosen a side and cannot be seen to show how that side has contributed to the system that has led to the invisibility of its own people.

Away from this rather complex problem at the core of Shadow Scholars, there is a reflection on the nature of the immigrant experience and its pressures. Kingori is vastly accomplished — she is one of Oxford’s youngest professors and the youngest black one ever — and we are shown how that came to be. Her mother wanted it for her and did her very best to be able to make it happen. As the older woman puts it, if a parent puts in 110 percent, the child would have to get to 120 percent.

There isn’t an overt link in the documentary’s narrative framing, but one can’t help but see a similar thing happening in Kenya with one of the shadow scholars and her inquisitive daughter. The mother hustles to provide for her sharp daughter — but unless that child gets to go to Oxford or a similar academic haven in the West, there is almost zero chance of anyone making a documentary about her work in the future.

The Shadow Scholars draws us into thinking that the situation is largely the fault of the West — someone might raise a student who would one day pay this child a few dollars per page to write an academic essay and then take out her name. But if you watch closely, you’ll find that the child’s home country, Kenya, is just as guilty in the erasure of its citizen’s name from her accomplishment. The motivation to write invisibly for another’s academic progress would decline if Africa had its own Oxford. And the kid would earn more if the platform for contract writing was something she herself created. But that’s unlikely to happen if she never leaves Kenya.

All of this means that there is a large audience for The Shadow Scholars after its festival run at IDFA 2024 and elsewhere. That audience would be made up of the Africa-patronising Westerner and the West-blaming African, wherever such kindred spirits may be found.

Asgari’s previous feature Terrestrial Verses (2023), co-directed by Alireza Khatami, was a portfolio of tragicomic vignettes satirising the Kakfaesque bureaucracy of contemporary Iranian society. Launched in Cannes, it won warm reviews and multiple festival prizes, but inevitably rattled the authorities in Tehran. Since returning to Iran, the director has been banned from both travelling and film-making.

Following in the footsteps of fellow embattled Iranian maestros like Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi, Asgari not only defies these restrictions but critiques them directly in Higher Than Acidic Clouds. A melancholy collection of memories and impressions, this intimate essay-film feels slender and disjointed in places, almost like a sketchbook of loosely connected observations. But it is also achingly beautiful, emotionally powerful and unavoidably charged with timely political import. It world premieres at IDFA this week with further festival screenings to follow in Tallinn Black Nights, Torino, Marrakesh, Goa and more.

Asgari plays a version of his real self in Higher Than Acidic Clouds, and also provides the lyrical, free-ranging narration. He dramatises his current restrictions in stylised terms, showing prison bars being fitted over the front door of his high-rise Tehran apartment, and repeated interrogations by security agents. But while they may confiscate his computers and books, he muses, they can not take his internal hard drives of memory, fantasy and creative imagination. And despite this confined one-room setting, there are ravishing cutaway shots here of snowy Iceland, a distant land where Asgari felt strangely at home, and Rome, where he lived for a decade. Referencing Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), he notes sadly how the Italian capital openly celebrates its rich cinematic history, in sharp contrast to Tehran.

The suffocating sickness of Tehran is a recurring motif in Higher Than Acidic Clouds. Choked with traffic fumes, the Iranian capital routinely ranks among the Top 20 cities for air pollution worldwide, a scientific fact that Asgari turns into a potent metaphor for a deeper malaise engulfing his homeland. In a superbly rendered piece of visual effects, he fills the skies above the city with a sinister blanket of cloud, rippling and pulsing and faintly biomorphic, like something from a sci-fi horror thriller. Though he does not draw explicit parallels between this poisonous entity and the toxic Iranian regime, casual references to agents “holding another girl’s hair hostage” clearly protest the government’s ongoing policy of arresting, jailing and even murdering young women like Mahsa Amini merely for breaking conservative dress codes.

Asgari dedicates Higher Than Acidic Clouds to his mother, who appears on screen in dreamlike scenes and flashbacks, including an exquisitely staged vignette of the director’s younger self sleeping on the back seat of a car. There are echoes here of Fellini’s autobiographical 8 1/2 (1963), presumably intentional, given the Fellini homages in the Rome section. The director’s four sisters also have cameo roles, gathering to share a private home screening of his debut feature Disappearance (2017), a film that would never be allowed to screen in a Tehran cinema. Bringing a welcome note of comic relief, the women offer mixed impressions, negative and positive. One gives the film five stars, on a par with James Cameron’s Titanic (1997).

Regardless of political subtext, Higher Than Acidic Clouds is more poem than polemic. In his doleful voice-over, Asgari mourns the lost Tehran of his youth, with its colourful parks and playgrounds, all now erased by an “Alzheimer’s afflicted city” crowded with drab concrete skyscrapers and monotonous grey streets. Meanwhile, he dreams of becoming a bird and soaring high over the metropolis, a fantasy that inspires some gorgeous high-resolution aerial shots: deserted fairgrounds, empty chairlifts, highways stretching towards the horizon, the mountainous skyline beyond.

Credit is due to cinematographer Arman Fayaz for clothing such a slender, impressionistic work in consistently sublime visuals. His luminous high-altitude vistas lend Tehran some of the same celestial radiance that Wim Wenders conferred on Berlin in Wings of Desire (1987). Composer Navid Divan and sound designer Abdolreza Heydari are also key players here, giving Asgari’s film a haunted, brooding audio dimension to match its finely crafted visual beauty.

Director: Ali Asgari
Screenwriters: Ali Asgari, Ali Shams
Cinematography:Arman Fayaz
Editing: Ehsan Vaseghi
Music: Navid Divan
Sound design: Abdolreza Heydari
Producers: Milad Khosravi, Ali Asgari
Production companies: Seven Springs Pictures (Iran), Taat Films (Iran)
Venue: IDFA (Envision Competition)
In Farsi
71 minutes

He might be one of the most consistently excellent avant-garde filmmakers working today – or, indeed, ever – but there is no doubt that Smith’s commonplace name seems to belie the idiosyncrasy and distinctiveness of his oeuvre. “I desperately wanted to stand out,” he reveals in his newest film, Being John Smith, while reminiscing about plans to change his name during his youth which he abandoned in a fit of bloody-mindedness. This new work, which screens as part of the Paradocs section of this year’s IDFA, is a meandering pseudo-autobiography, which considers
Smith’s life, career and legacy through the lens of his all-too-familiar moniker.

As with all of Smith’s films, it is consistently hilarious and meticulously crafted, combining still images and short video clips with his own deft voiceover. Smith’s voice will be recognisable to those who have seen his films before – he has spoken previously about its neutrality being useful to him in personifying the unreliable narrator’s that often present his stories. Here, his deadpan delivery only heightens the sensation of an artist reflecting on having to forge and wrestle with an identity and self-esteem in a world in which so dominated by the cult of personality.

As with all of Smith’s best work, the playfulness and comedy are balanced against an array of genuinely thought-provoking ideas, incisive political anger, and perfectly attuned form. His early admission that after an early growth spurt, when other kids at school caught up with him, he went from being ‘Big John’ to ‘Piddly Smith’ is self-effacing and funny but returns with poignancy later on. The notion of self-confidence and being undermined by your own name becomes something far more nuanced and intrinsic to the work than just a humorous observation that Googling his name is more likely to bring up a still from Disney’s Pocahontas than his half-century spanning career. “If you do a Google search for John Smith online, you’ll get about 35 million results,” he explains at one point. His new film is a succinct reminder, though, that there is only one John Smith.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: John Smith
Sound: Philippe Ciompi, John Smith
Production company: John Smith Films (UK)
Venue: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) (Paradocs)
In English
26 minutes

In any case, her film is really about herself and her family, even as it swells to encompass the politics of the nations hosting the film’s subjects. Spliced in with Zelovic’s home videos are news segments discussing the unrest that seems to be unending in the Balkans. At one point, a broadcaster announces that Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia have agreed to end the war. But before this moment, Zelovic has included what seems like an ordinary conversation—but with heartbreaking consequences.

In the footage, a young soldier tells an interviewer that he is not exactly sure why he is fighting; all he knows is that some people want to leave, and that part of the war doesn’t want them to. All he really wants to do, he says, is to survive. While some deadly violence might await him, he informs the interviewer that three of his friends have died that morning. The officers, presumably giving the commands, are unscathed. It is scenes like this, juxtaposed with Zelovic’s family life, that make Home Game worth its runtime.

But the use of archives is not the film’s sole boon. Its main asset is the director’s writing—unadorned, potent, incantatory in its directness. She has taken the measure of her life, her family’s life, and her country’s life. It is a complex entity, as documentaries of this sort must be. It must help that Zelovic was a broadcaster; her youth is telling, when she tells us that while she was reading the news, she wasn’t exactly aware of all of its ramifications at the time. But ignorance has never protected anyone from the costs of war. Eventually, the Zelovics leave their Yugoslavia and end up in the Netherlands, at which point Zelovic, who tells the story mostly in third person, expresses her “incredible luck”.

This country she has ended up in has so few problems that Tanja, a famous Dutch hippo, makes the news. On delivering this particular bit of Dutch history, Zelovic’s novelistic semi-detached manner allows a hint of amusement in her voice. Which makes sense in a somewhat ironic way: Home Game wouldn’t be as important a document if it didn’t present aspects of the chaos of Yugoslavia. As people in the business of writing know, happiness writes white.

Anyway, Zelovic’s verdict on the Dutch soon unravels. An interview with the populist politician Pim Fortuyn foretells the trouble ahead. In the interview, Fortuyn is critical of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants.

(It is perhaps unintended, but it is worth considering that while Fortuyn was quite critical of the Moroccans and Turks who had come into the Netherlands, the Yugoslavs seem more welcome. It’s hard to not consider that this is commentary, even if unwitting, of how skin colour works in discussions of this sort. Early on in the documentary, we are told that Dutch people look at that part of their continent and say they are always fighting every few decades. Somehow that fighting doesn’t reach Dutch soil—or Dutch criticism.)

Fortuyn is killed before the elections. The filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, whose politics is similar to Fortuyn’s, is also killed. It’s not quite on the scale of what’s happening in the former Yugoslavia but, it appears, the Netherlands is not quite the peaceful haven anyone might have dreamed.

Back home, Zelovic’s father signals a fear that the murder of such a high-profile individual as Fortuyn was done by a person from Yugoslavia, proof that an outsider is always an outsider, especially in their own hearts. As for the Zelovic matriarch, the matter is straightforward: “Shut up and be happy it was a Dutchman and not a foreigner.”

Of course, the title of the documentary refers to a concept in sports, and football frequently mixes the geographical with the political. In one scene, the director’s kid plays football with his friends and a conversation involving which teams they support ensues. What teams they prefer, unsurprisingly, follow the wayward patterns of their family history. The Netherlands, which has given their forebears a life without the immediate fear of war and poverty, isn’t the unanimous pick for all of the boys. And it is not quite clear what the film’s protagonist feels about their choices.

Overall, Home Game isn’t one of those slick documentaries that immediately draws in every viewer. The visuals are far from striking and you are always aware that what you are watching is unvarnished. But for Europeans interested in European migration and in the dynamics of living in a new land, Zelovic’s documentary contains important questions about belonging. It is the viewer’s incredible luck that she doesn’t offer pat answers.

Just get “the sounds of the words going” and “the idea of the size of breath that you need to do it comfortably,” he tells them. The idea is for them to not have to think about breathing as they act out words from Macbeth, the play for which they are rehearsing. It sounds like solid advice—even to the ears of non-actor. Shakespeare, after all, was as much a poet as he was a drama man.

Fiennes film itself seems to follow a similar wisdom. Her documentary is purposefully elliptical—it must be: She isn’t presenting a play in the manner that thousands saw, for example, Lee Manuel Miranda’s filmed stage play Hamilton. She isn’t necessarily introducing anyone to Macbeth either. If she’s up to anything at all, she is giving viewers a Cliff Notes of a masterclass on acting.

This frees her up to both convey some important bits of the coaching offered by Donnellan and his partner Nick Ormerod using a rhythm fashioned by Fiennes.

And yet, even in chopped form, the master here is the collection of words from Macbeth. Shakespeare remains unrivalled put in the mouth of an eager thespian. Every time Donnellan’s actors get it right—and they do so almost every time the camera gets them running a monologue, the coach pointing out quasi-imperceptible adjustments—it is very much unlike a rehearsal. It comes to seem like with any degree of seriousness applied by an actor, Shakespeare’s text would rise to offer a hand in assistance. These actors are ready; the text was born ready.

Under the tutelage of Donnellan, a less rumpled Alfred Hitchcock, the actors Fiennes capture imbue Shakespeare’s readily quickened text with even more liveliness. Seeing their excellence, one wishes some sort of biography of each actor was provided by the film but Fiennes is obviously more concerned with Shakespeare and with what the actors’ work. There is a reason the film is titled the way it is. All that we get here is acting. Not overacting or underacting. Just acting. Maybe if Fiennes could produce just the disembodied act without the actors, she would have.

But that’s just her. In directing his actors, sometimes Donnellan offers a perspective that seems to encapsulate living even as it is about acting—as when he says, “All ideal forms are dodgy. Truth. Beauty.” He goes on to elucidate the thought: “We have our perceptions of them but they tend to make us very unhappy.”

This is a quality that is also seen in Shakespeare. The Bard may have written about the dangers of grasping power by illegal, unethical means in Macbeth but if you wandered into a section of the play without quite knowing or understanding its arc, you might hear something indelibly true about guilt, about spousal relations, about the governance of human life by metaphysical forces.

Shakespeare can be about one thing and about other things. So, too, is Cheek By Jowl’s Donnellan. His teachings are about one thing—acting—but it is about other things, too.

In the hands of Sophie Fiennes (who’s also the film’s cinematographer and editor), the performances and the commentary attain a cinematic quality. Adding to the sense of the cinematic already brought to bear by the presence of a camera is the ancient building in which it all takes place. A rather cavernous entity, it has a film set quality. And Fiennes makes excellent use of the space by punctuating a selection of mostly still images that have no obvious narrative use but gives her project a near-palpable texture.

At over two hours, it must be said that Acting is about a half-hour too long. But it is an understandable impulse. Fiennes is serving two masters with her documentary: Donnellan and Shakespeare. To edit or not to edit Shakespeare? We all know the answer to that one.

Marking, whose award-winning track record includes Afghan Star (2009) and Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies and Cyber Attacks (2016), criticised the LFF decision, claiming “fear is its own form of censorship.” While the cancellation was arguably a testament to the power of her film, it was also a depressing reflection of the charged political climate in post-Brexit Britain, which has witnessed as string of violent anti-immigrant street riots in recent months. With Donald Trump heading back to the White House, and right-wing populist movements on the rise globally, this conventionally shot but politically timely piece of reportage feels likely to generate more news headlines and audience interest.

Marking’s central focus in Undercover is Hope Not Hate’s two-year investigation into the Human Diversity Foundation, a shady underground network that promotes “race science” and “human biodiversity”, a widely discredited fringe area of academia dedicated to proving the genetic supremacy of the white race. The brave undercover double agent is Harry Shukman, who adopts the alias of “Chris”, a wealthy investor with racist sympathies. Hopping between London, Tallinn, Warsaw, Athens and other cities, Shukman gradually infiltrates the group, forging friendships with key players including suave magazine editor Matt Archer, aka Matt Frost, as well as Danish researcher Emil Kierkegaard and Erik Ahrens, a controversial German social media strategist with links to the right-wing extremist party AfD.

Though fraught with tension and risk, an uneasy mood reinforced by Tara Creme’s throbbing score, Shukman’s detective work mostly involves hushed meetings with well-spoken white supremacists in fancy restaurants. But darker, violent, menacing forces are never far away. Stealth footage shot at related events and political rallies are rife with ugly racial slurs, sinister plans for mass ethnic cleansing, Nazi salutes, Holocaust denial and lurid fantasies about Muslim men anally raping women who express anti-racist views. As is often the case, many of the white male racists in this film seem to share a visceral sexual anxiety towards brown-skinned men. It may be a pathetic cliché but it remains reliably, hilariously true.

Woven around Shukman’s investigation, Undercover also includes glimpses of Hope Not Hate’s wider hinterland: their multicultural management team, their family backgrounds, their stoic reaction to routine legal challenges and death threats. A key subplot here is the group’s long-running campaign against “Tommy Robinson,” the alias of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a high-profile British far-right activist who co-founded the anti-migrant party EDL. Yaxley-Lennon has been repeatedly arrested and jailed over the last decade for assault, fraud, contempt of court, public order offences and other crimes. But he also has a huge online following and media champions among the world, including Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Donald Trump Jr.

Marking’s film concludes with a happy ending of sorts: an elegant sting operation in which Shukman teases out the identity of HDF’s shadowy financial backer from his wary, tight-lipped targets. He discovers that the organisation received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a multimillionaire Silicon Valley businessman who made his fortune from the dating website Adult FriendFinder. When Hope Not Hate made these findings public last month, Conru pulled his support for the group, claiming they had misled him about their “non-partisan academic research”. Frost/Archer has now left the organisation too.

The end credits also include a welcome note of grimly hilarious comedy: a statement from Ahrens protesting that HDF’s obsession with racial purity has been misrepresented by the film, and that they merely aspired to open an exclusive “gentleman’s club”. In related news, but too late to be included here, “Tommy Robinson” lost his latest legal case in late October and was jailed for 18 months for contempt of court after repeating false allegations against a Syrian refugee. These are small victories but, in the dawning era of Trump 2.0, it is hard not to conclude that much bigger battles lie ahead.

Director: Havana Marking
Cinematography: Havana Marking, Oliver Ridley, Tom Turner
Editing: Kristy Jane Miller, Ross Hazell, John Thirlby
Music: Tara Creme
Production companies, world sales: Marking Films Inc (UK), Tigerlily Productions (UK)
Venue: IDFA (Frontlight)
In English
95 minutes

In an inspired act of skewed cinematic homage, the hallucinatory screenplay to About a Hero was generated by training various AI programs on the films, voice, image and interviews of Werner Herzog. Winiewicz chose the legendary German director partly because one of his initial sparks to make this project was a claim by Herzog, back in 2016, that a computer would never make a film as good as his in thousands of years. The film-makers even named their main screenwriting program “Kaspar”, a winking allusion to Herzog’s macabre historical drama The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). With its timely themes and playful tone, this sui generis docufiction oddity will certainly appeal to further festivals and intellectually curious audiences following its world premiere in Amsterdam this week.

Herzog gave his wary blessing to About a Hero and contributes a brief audio clip, although fake versions of him dominate the film, notably a semi-lookalike actor (Willi Schlüter) and an uncannily accurate voice-over that is almost entirely computer-created. “I am an involuntary participant in this film,” this disembodied voice protests at one point, “an increasingly distorted translation of my identity”. But is this the real or the unreal Herzog speaking? This nightmarish uncertainty, tinged with deapdan humour, is all part of the film’s disquieting message. Vicky Krieps and Stephen Fry also have cameo appearances alongside authors, scientists, cultural critics and legal experts discussing the wider implications of AI.

Distilled by human authors from a sprawling AI screenplay, About a Hero actually feels less like a Herzog movie than a David Lynch thriller, a highly stylised murder mystery which unfolds mostly in the dark corners of a fictional German town. Following the unexplained death of a factory worker called Dorem Clery, everyone in the town seems to have their own shadowy explanation, including his widow Eleonore (Imme Becard), crime reporter Beatrice (Krieps), and a local lawman repeatedly billed as a “plice” officer, a wry nod to how AI programs often mangle language. The visually striking use of dimly lit interiors, unsettling sound design, and ghostly voices woven into the audio mix are very Lynchian touches too.

Full of stilted dialogue and a light sprinkling of AI-generated imagery, the film’s scrambled narrative also contains recurring allusions to the Hal 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), an early prophetic warning about machines outsmarting humans, which makes thematic sense. But many other plot detail here makes very little sense at all: an erotic seduction scene involving a woman and a toaster, an interview conducted using only body language, a cross-dressing neighbour, a deep zoom into a jungle tableaux that suddenly comes alive, plus minor characters with bizarre names like The White Haired Lady and The Man In Pain. “I don’t understand where this film is going”, complains the Virtual Herzog at one point, a sentiment that many viewers will share.

Even so, About a Hero just about sustains its compellingly weird mood throughout, held together by impish humour and an engagingly goofy logic of its own. At times it feels like a purely formalist exercise, a deep dive into the digital subconscious, unmoored from human reality. But there are flashes of intellectual clarity behind these ludic games and heavily mannered aesthetic effects. As Stephen Fry notes in his fragmentary interview, “even if we are not destroyed by AI, we will be humiliated by it.”

Director: Piotr Winiewicz
Screenwriters: “Kaspar”, Anna Juul, Piotr Winiewicz
Cast: Imme Beccard, Vicky Krieps, Willi Schlüter, Steffen Böye, Ida Beccard, Bernd Tauber, Claudia Harder, Bianca Rusu, Ramona “Momo” Stueckemann, Thomas Ebert, Christian Preuss, Mathias Max Hermann, Axel Schlimme, Anna von Auersperg, Figen Fener, Michael Fyrst Rasmussen, Genc Jakupi, Michael Davies, Tina Hermes, Robert J. deBrauwere
Stephen Fry, Deborah Bennett, Boris Groys, Charles Mudede
Cinematography: Emil Aagaard
Editing: Michael Aaglund, Julius Krebs Damsbo
Music: Lasse Aagaard
Sound designer: Peter Storm
Production designer: Emilia Bongilaj
Machine learning: Esbern T. Kaspersen
Conceptual technology: Mads Damsbo
Producers: Mads Damsbo, Rikke Tambo Andersen, Sam Pressman
Co-producers: Max Loeb, Sven Junker
Executive producers: Edward R. Pressman, Paula Paizes, Peter Hyldahl, Sven Junker, Alexander Kiehn, Jan Philip Lange, Micha Bojanowski, Trey Terpeluk, Doug Scott, Hicham Oudghiri, Aelfie Oudghiri
Production companies: Tambo Film (Denmark), Pressman Film (US)
World sales: Film Constellation
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In English
85 minutes

The Film Verdict: This is your final year directing IDFA. Are you feeling relieved or bereaved?

“Neither. It’s not that I feel relieved, I just feel confident this is the right moment, this is the right thing to do now. It’s been a great journey, and I am a sucker for a good end. But to be serious, this is also about finding the right time for transition, for the organisation and myself. And this is not a short-term thing, seven and a half years not short. We need to find a moment where this is positive, and where we can appreciate the good we have done, no matter how self-critical I am. Because I think our field altogether is in very vulnerable times. Film and documentary and customers, everything is really in a fragile moment. This makes one think of this responsibility. If you’re transitioning, let that not come in a moment where that will cause harm or difficulty.”

You and the festival drew intense criticism over pro-Palestine protests that disrupted last year’s IDFA opening, just weeks after the October 7 attacks on Israel. Obviously the wars in Gaza and Lebanon are ongoing and highly contentious. Did this controversy play any part in your decision to step down?

“No… but in a way, of course it did, because I’m not only an artistic guy, I’m also a human. I am faced with very difficult discussions about the distance between pragmatism and solidarity. For example, the realities of a film industry that is entirely ruled by neo-liberal economics and a very neo-liberal understanding of politics and ethics. To me, that’s very difficult, because it is always this tap-dancing or walking on a tightrope between losing your respect of not only of yourself, but also of documentary film altogether, and losing the livelihood or the sustainability of the sector. In a way, it really is a razor edge that was in the making for years. These big questions did not come from the current massacres in Gaza and Lebanon and so on, they came gradually through the big questions of this era, from racial reckoning to decolonisation, questions like this. Then suddenly the atrocities of Gaza made this into an accelerator. So the questions could not be postponed any more.”

Just to be clear, you are not saying you have been directly forced out by political pressure?

“Absolutely not. I’m still there for this edition, and for six months after that. We faced these difficult questions. We went through these discussions and dialogues, and we did a lot of good work, I think, on the topic. We organised an international symposium on the topic in August. It was very important and informative, but it had to be done without any presence of the press, without any public aspect. Because I’m trying to say it out loud today: the levels of self-censorship, direct and indirect, in our sector globally this year has been unprecedented. I think this is a reality. We had to do a symposium on the topic without any visible public aspects because many colleagues from around the world came and we needed to be able to talk openly and freely. It’s so scary that in this world of film, that used to be really always at the avant-garde of this link between society, politics, and art, usually film is here at the forefront. In the past year, I think we were beaten up by this extreme pragmatism of what I must call out as a neo-liberal mentality.”

What are some of your your personal highlights from this year’s IDFA program?

“Yes, indeed. I don’t prefer to single out films in competitions, but the festival is much bigger than the competition. To me, I am really excited about the way that our guest of honour Johan Grimonprez is approaching his curated program. We will screen his latest film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat on Sunday, and then I will have a long masterclass conversation with him. But also the way he curated his film choices, it became more like six bags of films and clips, and each one he will accompany personally with his laptop, not only with the full film screenings, but also with onstage talks that he does brilliantly to carry us through the journey of his films. So he will be not just showing us films that impacted him, he will be taking us through this journey with his own voice, with his own selected clips from different audiovisual works over the years.”

IDFA has always been a strong platform for hybrid film-makers who blend fact and fiction. This year you will host a heavyweight guest in this field, Romanian provocateur Radu Jude.

“Radu Jude is one of my generation’s most prominent art-house film-makers. He has a lot to say to the world and to film. Even when he makes a fiction film, the way he works is similar to the way a documentary film-maker works. For example, his last big achievement in fiction, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, during casting he found out that his main actress had this avatar that she did during the pandemic, so then he decided to cast and her avatar. Even in his fiction work, this cinematic approach is to keep his script open throughout the process, which is usually what documentary film-makers do well, not fiction. He made a number of short documentary films before, but this year he made two, and they’re long. So there’s reason to celebrate this and to have a discussion.”

There is also a retrospective spotlight on Cuban documentary cinema, including the underrated Afro-Cuban director Sara Gómez.

“I am very happy we are both doing a retrospective of the great Sara Gómez but also celebrating the uniqueness of the film school in San Antonio de los Baños, called ECTV. This is the school founded by Fernando Birri and Gabriel García Márquez in the ’80s. In a way, it is a unique oasis of artistic freedom in the middle of an island that is not an oasis of freedom. And we look at Sara Gómez’s history, one of the most beautiful stories of documentary cinema. This young woman died at 31, but remains an inspiration because she was this revolutionary film-maker who started her career by coincidence, because Agnès Varda was making her documentary in Cuba, and she was hired to be her assistant. Then she started making documentary films that were always starting from a place of celebrating the propaganda-style triumph of the revolution, and then deconstructing this until you see the massive paradox between the façade and the real experience of people in daily life. It’s fascinating how she was this revolutionary who was banned by the revolution again and again. She was basically omitted from history, but she’s now being rediscovered. So these are some of the highlights.”

You were jailed by the Assad regime in your native Syria in 2012. Did this give you a heightened empathy towards other oppressed, censored and incarcerated film-makers?

“Of course it did! It affected everything about me. That was a very miserable experience, and also a great experience of privilege because I was defended by the entire film world, and that was what saved my life. That’s why I co-founded, with other colleagues, the International Coalition for Film-makers at Risk, so that we can advocate for film-makers who are being prosecuted or whose safety is jeopardised anywhere. Now, for example, we have this Uyghur film-maker in China, Ikram Nurmehmet, who is detained. But to me, it goes beyond that and began before it. I grew up late ’90s, early 2000s, in a film world that was, as I said in the beginning, the film-makers were the avant-garde. In Syria, in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Palestine, in the US, in France, whenever there was an injustice, you would see those amazing long lists of film-makers signing together statements and raising their voice in solidarity. Then, gradually, I do not see that work any more.”

In politically volatile times, do outspoken film-makers risk being too political?

“Sorry, I don’t think there’s such a thing. I think we’re all very political. Who’s not political? I mean, look at anybody, from Martin Scorsese to Yorgos Lanthimos. Or if you go in fiction, in documentary, who is not political? The only thing that is not political, but even this is political in a way, is the massive glut of true crime and celebrity documentaries. This is de-depoliticisation of the documentary art. This is neo-liberal politics, to empty such a great art from its actual added value to the world.”

So making an apolitical film is actually a political statement?

“Absolutely. All of this is at the core of what documentary film stands for throughout its history. This is not something that Orwa Nyraiba or anybody can come now and discard. The history of documentary film-making has always been about pointing things like this out and about being, as I said repeatedly this past few weeks, being always uncomfortable, causing discomfort through serious artistic treatment of these difficult questions.”

As you prepare to leave IDFA, how would you sum up your legacy?

“I don’t know, I honestly don’t. Because it’s a massive amount of work that is really multilayered. What would be there, I would say, is balancing out the weight of the mainstream market, not by antagonising it but by allowing space for the independent, the under-financed and the under-represented. This applies both to geography, the West versus the rest of the world, and also to gender, to men and women and non-binary gender. And this also applies to artistic sensitivities. It is not only about films that will work in an American market for a big audience. No, these films are here in IDFA and they’re welcome, and actually also sometimes maturing brilliantly as a genre. But there are also many other genres that have their true meaning, and they are of no less importance. If there’s something I hope would leave some impression in this field of festivals or documentary or whatever, it is this continuous game between radicalism and pragmatism, where we are not cutting off all the bridges with a privileged mainstream market, but we are also able to put everybody else on the same stage.”

So a happy ending, on some level at least?

“I think we redefined a bit our place, which is not that we have answers, just that we are more confident in what we stand for. In a way, I look now and I see truly very good programs, both in the film side, in the new media side, and also in the markets with projects in the making. This made me feel like, yeah, this arc is ending. Other arcs are starting, but this is the right time for change. You can’t change when you are in the middle of a crisis. I think this is the happy place.”

*IDFA is currently running in Amsterdam, November 14-24, full program here: https://festival.idfa.nl/