The invasion began when Orwa Nyrabia, the festival’s ebullient and well-liked director, offered mild applause at the end of a surprise pro-Palestine protest on opening day. Hours later, that gesture had been magnified by some members of the media and a group of Israeli filmmakers into the kind of kerfuffle that usually ends with someone getting defenestrated from his position by an angry board of trustees.

This meant that, throughout the festival, there was an underlying tension in the air — and a few questions. After major screenings, filmmakers gathered at the Tuschinski cinema. the Pathé and elsewhere. What was the latest? Was Nyrabia’s head on the chopping block? The uncertainty was given an extra layer of complexity when pro-Palestine filmmakers began to withdraw their films.

But IDFA is a big festival. It can survive such withdrawals. What was harder to survive was the politics that placed it squarely in the middle of a long-running fight. In trying to please both sides, it had annoyed both. Night after night, at Café Kuyl, the festival’s famous watering hole, documentary stakeholders expressed their anger at an IDFA statement condemning the use of the slogan “from the river to the sea” as its response to the pro-Israel group. It was an unnecessary statement, they said. IDFA should have waited. “This is our Cannes,” one stakeholder said, suggesting that the community of documakers would have supported the festival if matters came to a head. According to this theory, IDFA just needed to be silent.

But silence hardly seemed ideal, given the bloodthirsty headlines and reports in the trades. Obviously, both sides of the conflict had found a scapegoat in IDFA. Unable to dictate the terms of the real Gaza conflict happening far away, these filmmakers and stakeholders were exercising their power over the one institution that actually listens to them. It might have been prudent to support IDFA’s call for a ceasefire but, in times like the present, reason frequently goes missing.

The festival’s selection of films had no such deficit of gumption. Across sections, the selection reflected the present turmoil in a deeply probing manner, often reaching across time and geographies. Two big awards for the International Competition section went to films about the personal costs of war. Mohamed Jabaly won the Best Director award for Life Is Beautiful, which describes how Jabaly finds himself trapped in Norway when the Gaza border is closed. He is told to fill out a form that doesn’t include his home country, Palestine.

A relatively costlier loss is at the heart of Shoghakat Vardanyan’s film 1489 which was named Best Film on awards night. The director investigates the disappearance of her brother after he joins the Armenian army as the country battles Azerbaijan. Vardanyan’s film also won the FIPRESCI award.

That success highlights what a terrific year it was for films from the Caucasus. From Georgia came Limitation, a film about the ousting of one of country’s leaders in the 1990s. A true feat of editing and resourcefulness, the film was cobbled together from material found entirely online. Somehow, its makers got the obtained footage into what seems like near-chronological order.

In the festival’s experimental Envision section, Canuto’s Transformation by Ariel Kuaray Ortega and Ernesto de Carvalho took the Best Film and the Outstanding Artistic Contribution awards. The section’s directing award was won by Kumjana Novakova, whose Silence of Reason presents accounts of women raped during the Bosnian War. The Reframe Award, which focuses on the use of archival material, was won by Selling A Colonial War, yet another film about war but from a public relations perspective. The Netherlands’s brutal adventure in Indonesia takes centre-stage in this impressive documentary.

As The Tide Comes In, about life on a small island off the coast of Denmark, was another notable picture. A beautifully crafted film, full of visual poetry and colourful characters, it offers commentary on climate change and community. On the notable but bizarre end was Thunska Pansisvorakul’s Damnatio Memoriae, a crazy but melodiously edited film in the Envision section. Filled with graphic images of violence and pornography, it is an interestingly shocking montage of atrocities committed across the world. Only viewers with strong stomachs need apply.

At past editions of IDFA, its award winners enjoyed a big party in a city known for its boisterous nightlife. But this year, on the night before the awards, a message went out to jury members and other attendees: the celebrations will be muted. No party; just drinks.

It wasn’t explicitly stated but it was easy to work out the festival’s motivation for staging a smaller event. The opening night had taught everyone a lesson in how implacable both sides of a conflict can be. If innocuous applause could cause so much trouble, why provide grounds for a repeat?

In his welcome speech on the awards night, Nyrabia announced that IDFA would organise a symposium to discuss how cultural bodies might navigate the tricky terrain of political conflict. The details were unclear but, going forward, they should be less so. “Growth, pain, we have to go through it and move on to a new understanding,” Nyrabia said, speaking at the International Theatre Amsterdam venue.

Whatever anyone thought about the festival’s decision, the subdued format of the ceremony worked. No one in the audience shouted any of the slogans that have dominated social media and made news headlines in the Gaza debate. No banners were hoisted. Nobody booed or stormed off in anger. Some of the juries reflected on the events of the preceding days but their criticisms were more measured than dramatic. Rwandan director Kivu Ruhorahoza mentioned fellow director Basma al-Sharif, who was initially a member of the Envision jury but who pulled out after IDFA’s response to the Israeli statement, yet his words were more conciliatory than inflammatory.

Days before the awards night, one jury member said she saw Nyrabia looking pale following news of filmmakers pulling their films. On the night itself, his usual ebullience wasn’t fully back but all traces of pallor had disappeared. When he hugged his personal assistant at the end of the awards, it seemed like the men were communicating relief as well as joy to each other. Was his head on the chopping block? It certainly didn’t seem so.

IDFA Award for Best Film – International Competition
1489
dir. Shoghakat Vardanyan

IDFA Award for Best Directing – International Competition
Life Is Beautiful
dir. Mohamed Jabaly

IDFA Award for Best Editing – International Competition
The World Is Family
editor Anand Patwardhan

IDFA Award for Best Cinematography – International Competition
Flickering Lights
cinematographers Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan

IDFA Award for Best Film – Envision Competition
Canuto’s Transformation
dir. Ariel Kuaray Ortega and Ernesto de Carvalho

IDFA Award for Best Directing – Envision Competition
Silence of Reason
dir. Kumjana Novakova

IDFA Award for Outstanding Artistic Contribution – Envision Competition
Canuto’s Transformation
dir. Ariel Kuaray Ortega and Ernesto de Carvalho

IDFA DocLab Award for Immersive Non-Fiction
Turbulence: Jamais Vu
dir. Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts

Special Jury Award for Creative Technology for Immersive Non-Fiction
Natalie’s Trifecta
dir. Natalie Paneng

IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling
Anouschka
dir. Tamara Shogaolu

Special Jury Award for Creative Technology for Digital Storytelling
Borderline Visible
dir. Ant Hampton

IDFA Award for Best Short Documentary
At That Very Moment
dir. Rita Pauls and Federico Luis Tachella

Special Mention – Short Documentary
My Father
dir. Pegah Ahangarani

IDFA Award for Best Youth Film (13+)
Sister of Mine
dir. Mariusz Rusi?ski

IDFA Award for Best Youth Film (9-12)
And a Happy New Year
dir. Sebastian Mulder

IDFA Award for Best First Feature
Chasing the Dazzling Light
dir. Yaser Kassab

IDFA Award for Best Dutch Film
Gerlach
dir. Aliona van der Horst and Luuk Bouwman

Special Mention – Best Dutch Film
Mother Suriname – Mama Sranan
dir. Tessa Leuwsha

Beeld & Geluid IDFA Reframe Award
Selling a Colonial War
dir. In-Soo Radstake

Special Mention – Beeld & Geluid IDFA Reframe Award
Milisuthando
dir. Milisuthando Bongela

IDFA Forum Award for Best Pitch
Son of the Streets
dir. Mohammed Almughanni

IDFA Forum Award for Best Rough Cut
Coexistence, My Ass!
dir. Amber Fares

IDFA DocLab Forum Award
Turbulence
dir. Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts

“Let him become a pastor and provide for our family,” she pleads. “Dear God, without you, we don’t know what to do.” Her husband, pummeled and defeated by life, looks on grimly.

It is no longer possible to see documentaries like Elvis Sabin Ngaibino’s and not hear the loud cries of criticism. Poverty porn! African misery!

That The Burden has premiered in a festival as big, European and, yes, white like IDFA lends veracity to those cries. The challenge for the filmmaker insisting on marching down this well-trod lane of African wretchedness is to find a way to fuse characters that are representative of their continent’s material desolation and yet come with their own specific dilemmas. This stubborn but ambitious filmmaker with a thing for tricky themes of this sort has to find people whose privation and sincerity can pierce through minds armour-plated by the socio-political jargon of the day.

On that score, Ngaibino has done exceedingly well. In that one prayer scene, Reine and Rodrigue, through the director’s camera, are able to convey their anguish uniquely, even if their problems are hardly unique in a continent filled with disease and penury. They also have an eerie appeal on the screen. In a different life, they could be the actors chosen to play their own real lives.

As the story unfolds, Rodrigue’s condition becomes exacerbated. But the deeper injury is to his pride. He wants to be a pastor, a career choice inspired by his wife, but he can’t quite reveal his disease to his pastor and the congregation. Who will allow a person living with HIV to lead a church? He disappears from fellowship for an extended period, which makes his secret and the possibility of it being divulged a subplot. Reine’s increasing panic and search for money becomes another subplot that reaches peak drama during a fight in a market.

Ngaibino has been here before. His first documentary feature, Makongo, showed poor students making their way through school. He also had a hand in producing Rafiki Fariala’s We Students, another film about poor students in his home country. The latter showed up at the Berlinale in 2022. The former won awards. So, it is safe to say that films of this sort will continue to be produced and to great success. Indeed, nobody can deny The Burden an extensive life at festivals and film schools around Europe and North America.

No one should begrudge a filmmaker working in a poor country his just rewards, for finding a rewarding story time after time — but one may wish and, perhaps, recommend? Might it be possible for Ngaibino, who surely is one of CAR’s leading lights in documentary filmmaking, to expand his coverage? Is it possible to find a scene like the prayer scene in The Burden in a story not quite as dire?

Of course, the nature of such a wish/recommendation ignores the ecosystem that makes African stories like this successful outside the continent. If there is no real market for the filmmaker within his country, he has to seek ways and stories that will sate a foreign appetite. They may be of vastly different realities, but on some level Reine and Rodrigue’s economic situation is similar to Ngaibino’s storytelling preferences. In both cases, the underlying pathology is a country and continent’s avowed irresponsibility towards its citizens.

Across the course of its 24-minute running time, this serene documentary stitches together 14 chapters, each of which depicts a painting in its current location. Around each one, life carries on as normal, giving a gradually forming sense of Chinese society through the dozen or so single-take shots representing the artworks. The pieces themselves are all made by practitioners from Dafen village, a suburb of Shenzhen in the Guangdong province. It was once a hotbed for now frowned-upon reproductions of famous Western art which – as a result of government reforms – has had to transition towards producing original art.

This particular situation provides some of the innate curiosity for Chen’s film, which pairs static shots of the milieu in which each painting is displayed with a text quote from the relevant creator. These range from epically scaled images of a charging bull or a Van Gogh-inspired wheat field which are both painted onto exterior walls to a forest scene or abstract colour fields that adorn offices and apartments. The comments are equally varied. Some are more reflective comments on the cultural and economic viability of art and the impacts of the change to the nature of what is being produced in Dafen. Others are more laconic or simply lament the effort required to make a living.

“Does it matter who painted this?” Asks one of the artists. “I work several jobs to support my family. No time for an interview.” As Chen’s film cobbles together these various gobbets of explanation and we are allowed to observe the comings and goings around the paintings, a national portrait coalesces as if from nowhere. None of the scenes have specifically pointed commentary but they join up with one another to raise questions about the ultimate value and relevancy of artistic work in a system in which both state intervention and market forces determine output as much as creative inspiration. Like Dafen itself, the impression 14 Paintings gives of China is a country undergoing significant change, and if its painterly microcosm is extrapolated out, Chen is keen that questions continue to be asked about its direction.

Director: Dongnan Chen
Producers: Dongnan Chen, Jisong Li, Heying Chen
Cinematography: Xiao Xiao
Editing: Xiao Yang, Sisi Chen
Sound: Pandy Peng, Bobo Lau
Production companies: Tail Bite Tail Films (China)
Venue: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Competition for Short Documentary)
In Chinese
24 minutes

Greenaway certainly showed few signs of mellowing with age during his IDFA talk. This is a director, after all, fond of making provocative claims like “cinema is dead” and “all film writers should be shot.” In Amsterdam, he repeated his long-standing gripe that cinema remains stifled by literary tradition when it should break free from text-based narrative altogether for the more elevated, contemplative, visually-led mode of painting. He once again expressed pessimism about the future survival of film as an art form, claiming: “I do believe there will be a day when my great-great grandchildren will probably say: cinema? What was that?”

Even so, Greenaway himself still appears heavily invested in this flawed, outdated art form. In Amsterdam he introduced the first-ever public screening of Walking to Paris, an “85 per cent” finished cut of his long-gestating period drama about Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brâncusi. In the early 20th century, hungry for the big-city art-world glamour of Paris, an impoverished but ambitious Brâncusi embarked on a 2,000-mile overland hike from Bucharest to the French capital, passing through Hungary, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. This epic journey, Greenaway claims, became his “apprenticeship”.

Starring Scottish actor Emun Elliot, Walking to Paris is a meticulously assembled montage of painterly landscape imagery, beautifully composed multi-screen tableaux, sex and violence and full fontal nudity, all set to a sumptuous mock-baroque score. A classic Greenaway film, in other words, which fleshes out the skimpy facts known about Brâncusi’s marathon pilgrimage with fanciful speculation. “We made a film of part fact, part fiction,” he told the IDFA audience. “I can’t prove anything, but you cannot disprove anything. So we’re in a useful sort of equivocal world where both of us, I think, have something to gain.”

Greenaway revealed that Walking to Paris is currently stuck in legal limbo in a Roman laboratory while its Swiss, French and Italian producers are “squabbling over who owns the copyright.” Meanwhile, the director has already begun shooting his next feature project, Lucca Mortis, in Tuscany. Stepping in to replace Morgan Freeman, Dustin Hoffman stars as Jacob, an American writer musing on family roots, death and mortality in the Italian city of Lucca.

“I believe we must take death more seriously,” Greenaway declared. “The Greeks suggested that all the world’s art is either about Eros or Thanatos. Cinema, I think we would all agree, is predominantly interested in Eros, the beginnings of our experimentations in sex and the beginnings of wisdom. I’ve made quite a number of films in that particular area, but the other thing is Thanatos. Some extremely good films have been made about old age: Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, for example. But not that many.”

Lucca Mortis is clearly a personal statement film for Greenaway, who also addressed his own feelings of mortality in Amsterdam. “I don’t think I have many years left,” he said. “I’m 81, which is far too old. But I would hope to be able to continue perhaps a little bit more. My magic number is 92, the atomic number of uranium. I would like to be able to reach 92. No guarantee of that whatsoever. But I assure you there are a great many projects which are bubbling underneath, and I only have to find the money. So if you have got any spare cash, there are at least five feature films ready to go…”

Stokman is mostly digging into events that happened many decades ago, but he uses Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine as a background framing device that links two authoritarian regimes, past and present. World premiering in IDFA this week, The Kyiv Files is scheduled for Dutch domestic release in February. The evergreen appeal of vintage espionage thrillers, lent an extra timely boost by current geopolitical events, should give it a decent shot at further festival bookings plus wider audience exposure.

Shot with an eye-pleasing retro aesthetic, The Kyiv Files opens with cameras gliding through the corridors of an old people’s care home in contemporary war-torn Ukraine, all set to wistful ambient music. The residents burst into nostalgic song, trade bittersweet memories, or fret nervously about family members caught up in the current war. Any connection with the film’s core archive material is tenuous here, apart from reminding viewers how Ukraine clearly remains a post-Soviet country still deeply scarred by decades of brutal Russian occupation.

Stokman then cross-cuts between the three historical KGB stories using contemporary interviews, archive footage and vintage still photos, all glued together by more abstract, impressionistic shots. Maximising the local angle, he begins with the strange tale of two young Dutchmen, Evert Reydon and Louw de Jager, who were arrested and jailed as western spies in Kyiv in 1961. This is the least satisfying of the trilogy, as The Kyiv Files never manages to clarify the truth behind these murky claims. Acting like an undercover agent himself, Stokman stakes out the dilapidated caravan where the reclusive de Jager has apparently chosen to spend his twilight years, but never even scores a glimpse of him. In a final melancholy coda, de Jager dies in 2022, taking his secrets with him.

Fortunately, The Kyiv Files has more engaging cases to explore. One is Lisovaya Vira Pavlovna, a teacher who was exiled to Siberia in the 1970s, along with her family, for spreading dissident “nationalist” and “anti-Soviet” views. Still an unrepentant bad-ass today, Pavlovna scathingly recalls the toxic cocktail of bullying, blackmail and bribery that KGB agents deployed to pressure vulnerable citizens into becoming informers and collaborators. “The regime was based on total control and fear,” she says, still burning with hatred half a century later.

The strongest of the three chapters features Regine Chivrac, a bohemian French woman of Ukrainian heritage, who visited Kyiv in the 1960s. There she was lured into a casual sexual relationship by Bogdan Nikolayevich, a married student working for the Soviets, whose tortuous logic wrongly earmarked her as a foreign spy. Adding an extra twist of casual misogyny, the nickname assigned to her by the KGB was “Courtesan”.

Stokman tracks down the gloriously spritely 80-ish Chivrac today in her Brittany home, allowing her to view her declassified KGB file for the first time, including clandestine photos taken of the couple in bed that resemble stills lifted from a chic French New Wave movie. “Is that me?” Chivrac wonders incredulously. “Yes I recognise my breasts… I look pretty cool.”

The dissonance between Chivrac’s romantic memories of this brief affair and Bogdan’s coldly descriptive written account of methodical betrayal is very telling, full of petty deceptions and shifty ambiguities that echo the power dynamic in more conventional relationships. She seems more bemused than offended by his treachery: “There was nothing wrong with his erection, that was real enough,” she laughs. But she also tells Stokman: “If you see Bogdan, tell him he’s a bastard.”

Alas, the film-makers fail to secure a proper interview with Chivrac’s former lover. The best they can deliver is a scratchy telephone call in which Bogdan sounds vague, evasive and befuddled. In common with the rest of The Kyiv Files, there is a sense of a fascinating mystery only partially resolved here, not least because these events happened so long ago, but perhaps also because access to first-hand Ukrainian and Russian sources has inevitably been drastically limited by the war. The end result is a patchwork film that offers more questions than answers, intriguing and entertaining on its own terms, but still missing a few key pieces of the jigsaw.

Director: Walter Stokman
Cinematography: Jackó van’t Hof
Editing: Bobbie Roelofs, Mieneke Kramer
Sound: Alex Tugushin
Producers: Frank van den Engel, Elize Kerseboom
Production company: Zeppers Film & TV (NL)
Venue: IDFA (Frontlight)
In Dutch, Ukrainian, French, Russian
78 minutes

World premiered at IDFA in Amsterdam this week, against the backdrop of a huge protest march demanding climate change action, As the Tide Comes In manages to be both timeless and timely, specific and universal. High production values, engagingly eccentric characters and headline-grabbing themes should ensure it has plenty more festival traction, awards potential and wider audience appeal.

As the Tide Comes In was shot on Mandø, a tiny low-lying island nestled in the northern section of the Wadden Sea, a string of coastal wetlands and mudflats that stretches from Holland to Denmark. Designated a world heritage site by UNESCO for its biodiversity, the area is also prone to catastrophic floods that have historically left thousands dead and even erased entire villages, including the original Mandø settlement back in the 17th century. With rising tides and increasingly extreme weather events caused by global warming, populations in this region have understandably dwindled as families leave for the safety of the mainland. The island’s official population has been shrinking for centuries, and was listed as just 31 in January 2022.

If there is a notional protagonist among the film’s collective cast it is Gregers Jorgensen, a taciturn farmer who once dreamed of leaving Mandø to become a pilot. Now a firmly entrenched fixture in his forties, he is the island’s youngest resident. A bluff, boozy, chain-smoking loner, Gregers patrols the desolate coastal landscape with just his faithful dog Sif for company. Wry conversations with his elderly parents and weather-beaten drinking buddies suggest he has lived a life of romantic disappointment, thwarted ambition and creeping bitterness. In a bleakly funny side plot, he applies to star in the Danish reality TV dating show Farmer Wants a Wife only to be rejected in favour of a far more eligible, telegenic candidate.

As Palacios and Johannesen show, Mandø attracts hordes of sightseers in summer, most perched on giant tour-bus trailers adapted to navigate the perilous umbilical causeway that intermittently connects the island to the mainland. But most of the remaining full-time residents are now elderly hold-outs who have spent their entire lives in this remote rural backwater. Another key figure in As the Tide Comes In is Mie Leverentz, a remarkable woman whose 99th and 100th birthday celebrations serve as loose temporal markers in the film’s free-flowing chronology. Perhaps inevitably, many of these older characters pass away during the production period, earning memorial dedications in the end credits.

There is a staged quality to many of the vignettes in As the Tide Comes In, which often feels more like artful docu-drama than pure documentary. Palacios and Johannesen admit they spent a long time embedded with the islanders, steering and shaping the narrative towards “carefully planned spontaneity” where possible. They are not above using discreet visual effects too, notably a theatrically outsized moon that becomes a recurring motif, filling the sky over Mandø. Peter Albrechtsen’s superb sound design also plays a key role, weaving a rich background tapestry of elemental weather and animal noises around Morten Svenstrup’s elegiac, brass-heavy score.

As the Tide Comes In sprinkles a faint patina of magical realism over its observational documentary elements, painting Mandø as an otherworldly Midsummer Night’s Dream of a place. Mysterious red lights dance through the trees, mesmerising murmurations of birds swirl across the heavens above, an antique vinyl record salvaged from the wetlands conveniently contains nostalgic folk songs about the island, and so on. But these lyrical touches are judiciously applied, never feeling too contrived or whimsical. This isle is full of noises, stunning sights and strange characters. Palacios and Johannesen merely place a frame around them with this gorgeous, absorbing meditation on the terrifying beauty of Mother Nature.

Director, cinematography: Juan Palacios
Co-director: Sofie Husum Johannesen
Editing: Nicolas Norgaard Staffolani
Music: Morten Svenstrup
Sound design: Peter Albrechtsen
Producers: Andreas Dalsgaard, Kasper Lykke Schultz
Production company, world sales: Elk Film (Denmark)
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In Danish
89 minutes

Like most of JR’s work, Tehachapi delivers an inspirational message about the power of public art to unite and empower marginalised people, especially when they are directly engaged as both collaborators and subjects of the artwork in question. The director has a long track record of making similar large-scale humanist statements in deprived neighbourhoods, war zones and trouble spots across the globe, from the West Bank to the US-Mexico border to Ukraine. He has chronicled many of these works on film, most notably in his Oscar-nominated collaboration with the late, great French cinema icon Agnès Varda, Faces, Places (2017). That pan-generational connection endures, with Varda’s daughter Rosalie credited as producer here.

Sporting his signature sunglasses and hat, JR began filming for Tehachapi at California Correctional Institution in 2019. He chose this supermax facility two hours north of Los Angeles for its vast concrete exercise yard, which he then repurposes as a giant canvas, visible from miles above. Working with a team of prisoners, he first takes their individual photos, then combines them into a vast group portrait to be pasted across the yard in monochrome strips. In the process, bonds are forged between convicts who would once have been sworn enemies in violent, racially segregated prison gangs, including former white supremacists who still sport swastika tattoos.

Tehachapi does not sugar-coat prison life. Violence remains a constant background feature, along with long spells of harsh solitary confinement inside brutal-looking outdoor cages. But JR mostly coaxes humane, confessional interviews from offenders who are full of remorse about their past crimes. While some are killers resigned to 100-year sentences with no prospect of release, others are striving hard to prove their eligibility for parole. Indeed, for many of them, working alongside the director on his co-operative project is clearly a calculated step in their slow journey towards freedom.

In 2020, Covid lockdown interrupts JR’s plan to return to Tehachapi. Finally, in 2021, he is allowed to revisit the jail to make a second collective artwork, plastering a mountain vista on the walls, symbolically erasing the barriers between incarceration and liberation. The director also takes his camera into the outside world for a wider societal snapshot, recording how the project’s online audiovisual version has helped humanise the prisoners, heal family wounds and reunite former friends.

A key player in making the Tehachapi project happen was executive producer Scott Budnick, a well-connected Hollywood veteran whose credits include The Hangover (2009) and War Dogs (2016). He also founded the Anti-Recividism Coalition, a non-profit organisation that supports rehabilitation of former convicts and campaigns for criminal justice reform. Budnick appears briefly in the film as cheerleader for the team alongside other outside voices, including the prison’s warden, deputy warden and civilian visitors who share moving testimony about their tragic personal experience of violent crime.

Tehachapi is packaged as an overwhelmingly positive story, culminating in several of the prisoners involved being released, moved up the parole rankings, or relocated to a more low-security wing of the jail. According to recent interviews with JR, this exercise proved so successful that he is now pushing for similar projects in other prisons.

All cinema is propaganda, of course, and no documentary can be truly objective. A cynic could easily dismiss Tehachapi as a fairly glib feel-good exercise that presses all the right buttons for well-meaning liberal viewers while essentially promoting JR’s faux-humble art-world superstar brand. A syrupy score by Enfant Sauvage, aka Guillame Alric, certainly lays on the heavy-handed sentimentality too thickly, straining hard to suggest we are watching a non-fiction version of The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

All the same, only the hardest of hearts will remain unmoved by the passion and compassion that JR brings to this ambitious, inclusive, hope-driven project. Whether or not art can truly change the world for the better, his idealism is infectious. “I have to remain a utopist,” the director said recently, quoting his late friend and mentor Agnès Varda. “If the artists are not the utopists anymore, then who else will be?”

Director: JR
Cinematography: Roberto de Angelis, John Hunter Nolan, Tasha Van Zandt
Editing: Maxime Pozzi Garcia, Sylvie Landr
Music: Enfant Sauvage
Producers: Rosalie Varda, Marc Azoulay, Marco Berrebi
Co-producers: Nathanaël Karmitz, Elisha Karmitz
Production companies: Ciné Tamaris, Unframed, Mk2
World sales: Mk2
Venue: IFDA (Signed)
In English
93 minutes

We revisit the tension and uncertainty of this cliff-hanger wrangle for the future direction of the South Caucasus nation in all its raw immediacy. The year is 1991, a time of tumult as the Soviet Union is collapsing and breakaway movements are gaining momentum across Eastern Europe to overthrow Communist rule and Moscow’s yoke. It is an era before mobile phones and self-publishing on social media will take the consumption of images from war’s frontlines to saturation point for an always-online public. Asatiani and Dumbadze label their footage in general terms (election clips, international media, KGB cameras, pro-government and pro-opposition cameras) to broadly orient us through the various perspectives who have a stake in recording and interpreting the crisis, resulting in a vision of Gamsakhurdia’s overthrow that is critical of the Russian imperialism that backed it. 

Limitation follows rising protests both against and for Gamsakhurdia’s government following his November 1991 inauguration. Just before Christmas, street fighting rages in Tbilisi, as the National Guard splits into two factions, and chaotic clashes, with grenade launchers and other heavy-duty weaponry, are filmed from vantage positions on both sides. Armed rebels lay siege to the parliament building, with the president and his supporters holed up inside. Foreign journalists who’ve made it into the building and are hungry for soundbites push for access to Gamsakhurdia. Two weeks into the siege he is still defiant but floundering, and pointing the finger at Eduard Scheverdnadze (former First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party) as a force behind the putsch, obstructing the hopes of independence to guard old Soviet power.

Established Georgian director Giorgi Ovashvili already put the ill-fated statesman onto more radars worldwide with his majestically gloomy, solid offering Khibula (2017), which enjoyed a modest festival run and portrayed Gamsakhurdia’s flight into the mountains after he unsuccessfully tried to retake power after the coup, using the more conventional format of historical drama to leverage suspense and mood-driven atmosphere. Audiences not already cognisant of the geopolitics of the region or especially interested in Georgian politics may struggle to fully immerse themselves in material presented with few guiding, narrativising markers in Limitation. Andrei Ujica’s comparable, widely-played and acclaimed portrayal of the rule and overthrow of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010), used a similar assemblage method, but benefitted from both a more sophisticated deep-dive into archives, and the global public’s greater familiarity and morbid fascination with its subject.

Regardless of prior levels of audience investment in this undeniably fascinating chapter of Georgian history, Limitation constitutes a frequently gripping reminder of the way in which history depends on who controls the angle (and camera), and documentary festival programmers should jump on it. What’s more, with Georgia’s current ruling party Georgian Dream accused of strong pro-Kremlin sympathies by the opposition and those who see the nation’s future as lying with closer allegiance to the European Union, and with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine still raging, the question of covert Russian influence is as urgently topical as ever.

The president is shown on camera denying accusations to international journalists that he had advocated for a Georgia for Georgians only that denied the rights of ethnic minorities, or that he had displayed tendencies of demagoguery (his opponents dub him a “Judas”), in a film that does not cover over criticisms of the leader or indulge in hagiography. The ideological motivations and political underpinnings of the coup are not examined in any great analytical depth, with space left for audiences to draw their own conclusions from an assemblage of telling moments — but it presents the power of Russia as shadowy, ever-present and unmistakable.

Directors: Elene Asatiani, Soso Dumbadze
Editor: Elene Asatiani
Writer, Producer: Soso Dumbadze
Sales: Soso Dumbadze (soso.dumbadze@gmx.de)
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In Georgian, English, Russian
125 minutes

THE FILM VERDICT: We have now seen about half of the films for the Reframe Awards, a lot of them related to war, strife, conflict. Are archives inevitably tied to tragedy, especially when they’re connected to a country’s history?

Biljana Tutorov: Now that we have several devices used by people to record events, the immediate association of archives to me is not tragedy. But judging by what we have seen in the films for our cross-section award. there is more tragedy for humanity and female bodies in particular. A lot of these violent events are orchestrated by men. I haven’t quite digested this impression yet. In my work, I am interested in the fabrication of archives. But the use of archives rhymes with big emotions. Unfortunately, nowadays, big emotions — remember that I am from the Balkan region — are a lot about tragedy. So even when the use of archives do not start from tragedy, it usually ends there.

TFV: Are there hierarchies in building archives?

Melissa Thackway: Absolutely. There is no such thing as objectivity. Archives come from the Greek word “archeion”, which means public records. Gatekeepers decided what goes in and what stays out, and who has access to those archives. So, there was already a system of power at play. Now that we can make our own archives, there is a de-hierarchisation of what is an archive and what isn’t. But even on the personal level, you are making choices when you choose what to keep. It is a construction.

BT: Also, the winners write the history. So, the concept of power is always present.

TFV: Melissa, you have done work with African filmmakers. What do you make of African filmmakers needing to produce money to use what is, in essence, their own history?

MT: It is a thorny issue. Let me share an anecdote. Back in the 1990s, it was possible to get material that wasn’t digitised and owned by a European institution. Jean-Marie Teno, the Cameroonian filmmaker, heard of some materials being held by the French army. He wanted to use them. Somehow, he was able to find a group of young men who were conscientious objectors and so instead of sending them off to war, the army put them in charge of sorting these archival materials. They gave him access to what he was asking without payment and without asking permission from their superiors. If he was to access and use those same materials today, he would have to pay thousands of euros per minute. It remains a thorny issue.

TFV: People who record themselves are usually trying to make themselves nice. Is that what is happening for countries when they are creating their archives?

MT: Yes. Even with some of the unflattering things we have seen. Many of those materials were created to make those countries look good. It is the film directors who have altered that perception for us. So it is great to be able to observe these multiple points of view. The ability to create multiple records brings us closer to objectivity than one source of truth.

With colonial archives, the colonisers were constructing an image they wanted for themselves as civilisers. “We are doing these wonderful things for you” and so on. We are now looking at it decades later with different eyes. We hear their message, but we now know what they were not showing. We now have more context. It’s important that now there are voices that can challenge the official discourse. As the African proverb goes, “Until the lions have their storytellers, the hunt will always glorify the hunter”.

TFV: With the inevitable coming of multiplicity of archives and interpretation, aren’t we courting chaos in the future?

BT: It’s complex. I’m not sure how the Babel of archives will evolve going forward. But the question I am most interested in is: what happens to the pictures we put in the public domain, but which are actually owned by private companies?  I hope an integration is possible.

MT: I think the multiplicity of voices is not a problem. We have the ability to listen to more than one voice.

TFV: What about truth? Is truth important?

MT: What is truth? [Laughs]

BT: Whose truth? [Laughs]

TFV: When it was just the government and a small set of people providing interpretations, it was perhaps easier to arrive at a composite truth. It looks like we are heading into an amplified Rashomon.  

BT: The problem is we don’t know how to read pictures. As documentary professionals, we come back to this.

MT: The problem isn’t that there will be too many archives; the problem is we aren’t taught how to contextualise and query images. If I see an image, I think, who made that image? What was the context? I put myself at a distance from it and I question it. I try to teach students how to ask these questions. I remember watching news of the Iraq War on British television and on French television. It was two different things because the French opposed the war and the British supported it. And it was the same event. I was getting this angle and that angle. So, you have to be able to think critically. Fake news is a problem because people see something and don’t question it. They just believe it. School doesn’t teach you to think critically—not in France.

TFV: Let’s bring this idea of the same event receiving different interpretations to IDFA 2023. The surprise pro-Palestine protest and Orwa Nyrabia’s clap on opening night has sparked quite a controversy. One side says the festival director meant one thing; the festival says he meant another. The video and photos from that night will be archived. 

BT: We are in such a charged time that everything we do already constitutes an archive. But I was thinking about what happened that night, about what an image might say and not say. Sometimes the degree of light in a hall is not necessarily the degree of light in the photo. You can’t take a picture as a straight-up truth because there could be optical differences.

TFV: I was in the hall when the protest happened and was surprised at the unfair interpretation of Orwa’s clap. What does the controversy say about the power of images and their malleability?

MT: It shows the pernicious strength of images. They are so powerful and can be so misused. For example, the colonial authorities immediately understood the power of images when cinema was invented a decade after the Berlin Conference. They had to sell colonization to their people. So cinema has been in service of propaganda from the very start. All regimes — whether it’s Hollywood or the Soviet —  have used cinema to convey their ideology.

TFV: In a few years, there will be documentaries on what is happening in Gaza right now. Some of the people making those films on both the Israel and Palestine sides will want to come to IDFA. What is a documentary festival’s role when there’s such charged material?

MT: Expanding the discourse around each film will be necessary. Maybe it is difficult at this moment for there to be a calm conversation. But in five years, the conversation will be different.

BT: There are fewer and fewer spaces in broadcast media that will provide space for both sides to debate. So a place like IDFA becomes an instrument of democracy. It will be important to emphasise the filmmakers’ Q&A to provide context. But unfortunately, not everybody is honest and everything can be manipulated. I learned a lesson from one of the documentaries we have watched: We always understand too late—after a lot of blood is spilled. After a lot of lives are lost.

It helps enormously that Baroness Elsa was such a gloriously flamboyant, irreverent, bohemian character. A globe-trotting proto-feminist and born rebel, she wore outlandish outfits and notched up many lovers, male and female. She was once arrested for wearing trousers and smoking in public. “She is not a futurist,” artist Marcel Duchamp once declared, “she is the future.” Duchamp’s creative relationship with Elsa shapes the main narrative mystery behind Alreadymade. But this is no ordinary fact-driven bio-documentary, more like a formally adventurous artwork in its own right.

Alreadymade world premieres this week at IDFA in Amsterdam, where Visser previously served as interim artistic director. A domestic release on both big and small screens is already scheduled. Further festivals will likely also see the appeal of mixing Duchamp, feminist themes and strikingly inventive visuals. It makes perfect sense that Visser is also creating an installation version to be shown in art galleries.

Duchamp’s infamous “readymade” sculpture Fountain, a urinal signed with the crytic alias R. Mutt, is the other main protagonist of Alreadymade. Now widely regarded as a landmark foundation stone of conceptual art, this prankish Dadaist statement was initially rejected from a New York exhibition in 1917. The original was apparently thrown away and lost, but Duchamp later cemented his reputation with a limited run of reproductions in 1964. As Visser shows, Fountain has since become a seminal pop culture icon, inspiring endless copycat tributes, parodies, online memes and even cheeky urination attacks by other artists, including Brian Eno. In 1999, one of the later copies sold for $1.7 million at Sotheby’s in New York. In 2004, the scupture was voted the most influential artwork of the 20th century by 500 British experts. Without Duchamp, there would arguably be no Andy Warhol, no Jeff Koons, no Damien Hirst.

In Alreadymade, Visser digs deep into the controversial theory that the sculpture’s true uncredited creator was Baroness Elsa, who was living in Greenwich Village at the time it first surfaced. The Baroness certainly moved in the same circles as Duchamp, collaborating with him and Man Ray on an experimental film. Some say they were lovers. But her career took a very different path, and she ended her days in Paris, impoverished and obscure, dying in 1927 from a gas suffocation that may have been suicide. Very little of her artwork survives today.

Art-world rumours that Baroness Elsa was the true creator of Fountain has been circulating for years, inevitably proving contentious. The key piece of evidence is a vaguely worded letter from Duchamp to his sister in which he claims an unnamed female friend delivered the original urinal piece to the exhibition “under a masculine pseudonym”. This is backed up by vague stylistic similarities to some of Elsa’s other found-object sculptural collaborations around the same time. In fairness to Visser, she does include dissenting voices in Alreadymade who refute speculation that Elsa was the unsung creator behind history’s most famous toilet. But the director also builds an eccentric, wide-ranging case for the defence, including clips of speech analysts pointing out telltale signs of lying in interview footage of Duchamp discussing the origins of Fountain.

Among this dense, colourful, fast-moving collages of recycled archive material, Visser adds some cheeky fabrications and readymades of her own. Scratchy video and audio footage purports to be taken from an unfinished German TV drama about Baroness Elsa, which unravels into a bitter argument between female star and male director. Like much of Alreadymade, these flashback clips feel like artfully staged fakes, adding another post-modern layer to the film’s meta dissection of art-world gender politics. Visser also hosts a surreal online debate inside a virtual Starbucks, the guests all represented by digital avatars. Among them is author Siri Hustvedt, who put Elsa into her 2019 novel Memories of the Future. One participant calls Fountain “the world’s first great feminist anti-war work of art.” Another protests that Elsa “wasn’t written out out history, she was never written in it.”

While Alreadymade does not make a definitive case for Elsa being the secret mastermind behind Fountain, it does paint a rich and imaginative portrait of a groundbreaking female Dadaist and unfairly overlooked figure in the male-centric pantheon of 20th century art history. More than anything, this film underlines that the Baroness was a living artwork herself. Indeed, in her closing section, Visser recruits dancer-actress Rex Ellis to embody Elsa in motion-capture digital avatar form, picking her from a section of audition tapes, which she melds and intercuts here in a jump-cut montage. Boxy and clunky, these CGI dance sequences tell us little about the real Elsa, but they arguably pay symbolic homage to her free-spirited nature and vanishing artistic legacy. A lavish soundtrack features Ligeti, Bartok, Sibelius and others alongside more contemporary pieces, with recurring bursts of spiky jazz piano maintaining a background buzz of 20th century modernist energy.

Director: Barbara Visser
Cinematography: Gregor Meerman, Joost van Herwijnen
Editing: Tim Roza
Sound: Siebren Hodes
Producer: Monique Busman
Production company: Tomtit Film
World sales: CAT&Docs
Venue: IDFA (Signed)
In English, French, Dutch, German
87 minutes

Made by Sirin Bahar Demirel, this 15-minute short seeks to explore the way that paintings, photographs or embroidery can be loaded with the real emotions of the situation behind their creation, as well as the depiction of said situation that they were created to convey. She begins by drawing a parallel between the glowing molecules in the brain that represent memory formation and the collecting of photographs in an album, before interrogating what we choose to add to our personal memory compilations.

Across the film, the nature of this inquiry shifts and changes – beginning with a question about her grandfather, who was a painter. Family photos, colour fields, hand-drawn elements and clippings of paintings are cast together on screen like the contents of a scrapbook. Through a narration accompanying these images, Demirel contemplates whether the impressions left in the paint by her grandfather’s hands might also suggest, in some esoteric way, the other kinds of marks his hands left. Similarly, to what extent may the flowers embroidered by her grandmother hold onto or release the traumatic memories of her life? How far is our reading of these visual expressions – or, for that matter, any creative text – defined by our understanding of their construction?

In Between Delicate and Violent, Demirel seems to want to work through these questions but to also understand the degree to which re-forging the various archival materials at her disposal can bring their underlying truths to the surface. Images are obscured or distorted – photos are scratched, sections are concealed, and details are expunged – while others are juxtaposed or embellished with hand-drawn additions and animations. In some instances, these interventions act to recontextualise the meaning of a picture in line with the narration, but more broadly the film creates an exquisite graphic representation of the way the archive lives, forming new connections and being reformed in its reception.

Director, screenplay, producer, editing: Sirin Bahar Demirel
Sound, music: Onur Kahraan
Production companies: Bilsart (Turkey)
Venue: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Competition for Short Documentary)
In Turkish
15 minutes

In Wolf Country, which has its international premiere at the International Film Festival Amsterdam in the Frontlight section, is an attempt by documentarian Ralf Bücheler to separate and elucidate the unembellished facts about this social animal and its behaviour from the fantasy and fear-mongering tabloid newspaper reports that bolster calls to eradicate it. This investigation into the lupine lifestyle and its impact does not shy away from the damage wolves can cause or their earthier aspects, as researchers collect bloody carcasses and bodily waste to learn more. The wiry, brownish, furtive-looking animals appear less majestic and more vulnerable to harm by humans — that other predator — than the popular imagination would have us believe.

Relying heavily for its information on those devoted to scientific monitoring and wolf population management, liaising with farmers and educating the public, the film takes us inside the spirited public debate in Germany over how best to handle the wolf resurgence. It is a nation in which there is little wilderness left for them, and they must survive in close quarters with humans, sharing their roads, fields and villages. The talky and explanatory, procedure-based orientation of the doc is not the most seductive approach and can feel uninspired, particularly in its extensive segments pulled from lectures and talk shows (the subject is handled with less finesse than in Sebastian Mulder’s hit 2021 short doc made using surveillance footage Naya, on a wolf that returned to Belgium and was made into a tabloid celebrity). But Bücheler succeeds in stripping the glamour from our preconceived perceptions of wolves, to leave us more informed on the realities of a fascinating shift in the dynamics of nature and civilisation, and our inter-species hierarchies of power and control.

We follow the activities of the Lupus Institute for Wolf Monitoring and Research in the German state of Saxony as its employees screen the remains of dead wolves for insight into their health and habits, assess local sightings and amateur footage, and trace activities captured by night-vision camera. The black-and-white imagery of wolves roaming the forest in the dark and crossing paths with other creatures, including stags, their piercing eyes bright dots of light, is the film’s most engrossing. We become privy to what seems a secret world of bustling activity and fraught drama that goes on as humans sleep, and sometimes results in death or dire injury. Another segment shows a veritable crime scene, after ten sheep are killed in a spree, but just one foreleg is eaten. Their bodies are numbered, and the farmer interviewed, as moves are made to analytically determine if a wolf was responsible. It is a gruesome event, to be sure, but instinct in nature is not mystified; rather, potential solutions are examined, including the hulking stock guard dogs that are a new but not yet widespread concept in Germany.

Tyrolean alpine farmers protesting with cowbells to allow the legal hunting of wolves again, conservationists eager to balance the protection of all creatures, and scientists all offer their expertise and perspectives. What we are left with by the end, ironically, and perhaps without the full intention of the filmmaker, is a portrait not just of the returning wolves, but of administrative human beings as a species. Convinced of their superior intelligence and their right and duty to order and rule over the natural world according to their precepts, it is they who decide whether and on what terms wolves may come or go, by a democratic process of knowledge, debate and elections that sits oddly beside the wolves’ oblivious nocturnal patrols.

Director: Ralf Bücheler
Producer: Ingo Fleiss
Cinematography: Daniel Schönauer, Sebastian Koerner
Editing: Anja Pohl
Sound Design: Paul Meier
Music: Cico Beck
Production company: If… Productions Film GmbH
Venue: IDFA
In German
102 minutes

Screening at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in the Best of Fests section, the haunting, evocatively shot doc should continue to enjoy wide festival play, rich as it is in ideas about place as a site for power imagined and belonging contested. It traces the changing fortunes of a monumental building, standing isolated in the mountains of southwest Georgia, that served as a tuberculosis sanatorium through the eras of the Romanov tsardom, Soviet Union and capitalism, before its fading grandeur succumbs finally to the aggressions of modern-day acquisition. 

The film is largely observational, drawing us into the world-out-of-time feel of the sanatorium. Its inhabitants, who seem forgotten or at least hidden away from society, pass meandering days playing backgammon or drinking together, routines marked by little other than the changing of seasons and scheduled taking of medication. There is a sense of trust-based rapport built up between the patients and film crew and personal investment over five years of intermittent shooting. Co-director Chachia is frequently in the frame, chatting to residents about their situations and even romantic aspirations. The title and surreal sense of temporal drift as the camera traverses the battered hallways inevitably bring to mind Thomas Mann’s twentieth-century lit classic of near-mystical absurdity set in a Swiss alpine sanatorium, The Magic Mountain. Both share a vision, albeit the doc on a more modest scale, of the sanatorium as a barometer for wider sickness and political paroxysms in the history of Europe at large.

A surfeit of looseness as we are immersed in the aimless days of the inhabitants is wisely avoided through beautifully scripted but unobtrusive narration, which forefronts how public and private architecture intersect with power. Chachia recalls in voice-over how she contracted tuberculosis herself when younger and recovered, avoiding a stay in the mountain sanatorium of Abustami, which took in only those resistant to antibiotics. But she continued to have nightmares about the place, which loomed as a threat in the popular imagination. Tuberculosis was considered shameful in a Soviet Union that, according to propaganda, was home to no poor, violent or ill people; those who did not conform were prone to disappear from view.

The narrator addresses Abastumani directly, as if it were a living entity, adding to an atmosphere that is thick with the past. The history of the building’s founding is, in its retelling, fascinating. It was constructed in the middle of a forest after George, the third son of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia’s Romanov family, was diagnosed with TB. In India, it was prophesied that he would be healed on a magic mountain in the Caucasus. He did recover — only to be killed by skiing into a tree before he left. Though his body was returned to Russia, his heart was removed and buried in Abustami.

There is a sense that, as a custodian and physical remnant of the historical events that have occurred in and around its walls, the sanatorium is indeed a receptacle of existence. It is also in need of protection, especially when a prospective sale to an oligarch is touted in the film’s final third, conjuring the spectre of imminent bulldozers as mortality comes not only for the patients but the gargantuan structure itself. In recording the eventual fate of the sanatorium, as it becomes the property of one of Georgia’s most influential men and the residents are unceremoniously moved out of the medical facility that has become a home to them over the years, the film bears echoes of Taming the Garden (2021). Acclaimed and widely played abroad but politically controversial and suppressed at home, it is Georgian documentarian Salome Jashi’s portrait of unlimited and unchecked buying power run amok, in the form of a billionaire and founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party who goes to absurd lengths to uproot and transport centuries-old trees to his private garden. Magic Mountain powerfully suggests that Abustami’s ghosts and the fears stoked around tuberculosis and otherness have been replaced by a new nightmare, in which Georgia’s history and heritage is for sale.

Directors, screenwriters, editors: Mariam Chachia, Nik Voigt
Cinematography: Nik Voigt
Sound Design: Sebastian Zsemlye
Music: Paul Fothergill
Producer: Mariam Chachia
Production companies: OpyoDoc, TVP – Polish Public Television
Venue: IDFA
In Georgian, Russian
74 minutes

This Blessed Plot is winkingly billed as a “documentary fiction film pageant”. It is also an unusually rough-edged production compared to Isaacs’ previous features, with its non-professional cast, stilted dialogue, clunky amateur dramatics and frequently raw camerawork. It is never entirely clear if this scrappy, mannered aesthetic is a deliberate choice or simply the result of the director’s emphatically lo-fi approach. In any case, it makes for an uneven viewing experience. But this is still a generally engaging passion project, rich in off-beat charm and imaginative touches. Screening at IDFA in Amsterdam this week, it will likely enjoy healthy festival traction but niche audiences thereafter.

For such a small town, Thaxted is surprisingly rich in cultural connections, with deep-rooted local traditions of folk music and morris dancing. Former residents include classical composer Gustav Holst, whose Planets Suite features heavily on the soundtrack to This Blessed Plot, and Christian socialist vicar Conrad Noel, whose fictionalised musings serves as a kind of ghostly audio narration for much of the film. Thaxted itself has been a movie location many times, notably for the short documentary Ripe Earth (1938) by future comedy maestros John and Ray Boulting, and for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales (1972). Both are referenced by Isaacs, with Noel himself appearing in repurposed archive footage.

Featuring an unschooled cast playing lightly disguised versions of their real selves, This Blessed Plot leans more overtly towards docu-fiction than most previous Isaacs films. He is again working with screenwriter Adam Ganz here, his collaborator on The Filmmaker’s House (2020), which brought a socially and ethnically diverse cast of characters into the director’s own suburban London home. A key protagonist in that film, burly builder and obsessive football fan Keith Martin, returns here to once more perform a thinly remixed version of his real self.

For this new chapter, the screen version of Keith is newly widowed (unlike his real self) and recently relocated to Thaxted. There he is haunted by the ghost of his wife Sue, as played by Susan Mallendine, who previously worked with Isaacs in It’s All White In Barking (2007). Keith cannot see Sue’s spectral visitations but his young Chinese lodger Lori (Yingge Lori Yang) communes with spirits in a matter-of-fact way. As a result, she uncovers a dramatic back story of infidelity and deceit that leads to violent confrontation between Keith and his roguish ex-con friend “Uncle” (Paul Bettie).

An aspiring documentary maker, both on and off screen, Yang is one of Isaacs’s real off-screen college students. Indeed, this whole film is loosely framed as her project, a curious outsider on a journey into the English hinterland. Some of her self-shot footage is even used in the final edit, which arguably helps excuse its lack of formal polish. But look beyond the self-imposed aesthetic limitations and clunky soap-opera twists that Isaacs and Ganz have imposed on their rich mix of material and This Blessed Plot emerges as a rough diamond, a muddled but enjoyably original essay-film curio which prods away at that fuzzy liminal region where England’s Dreaming hovers between mundane reality and comforting mythology.

Director, cinematography: Marc Isaacs
Screenwriter: Adam Ganz
Cast: Yingge Lori Yang, Keith Martin, Margaret Catterall, Susan Mallendine, Paul Bettie, Norman Cullis
Producters: Marc Isaacs, Lydia Kivinen
Editing: Marc Isaacs, David Charap
Sound: Sarah González Centeno
Producion company, world sales: Andana Films
Venue: IDFA (Signed)
In English
75 minutes

The show follows the tabletop adventures of a Dungeons and Dragons group made up of voice actors who act out the emotions of their characters as their various adventures unfold. The one exception to this is a character with a special ability called ‘Rage’ who initiates it by calmly stating: “I Would Like to Rage.” The catchphrase has become a meme, but in its counter-intuitive politeness, filmmaker Chloe Galibert-Laine finds a hook to explore the prescribed ways that anger is permitted by the measure of societal norms.

Galibert-Laine is one of the foremost practitioners of the video essay form known as desktop documentary. Films within this mode use the familiar set-up of a laptop background as the scenery onto which their investigative drama unfolds, opening browser windows and typing on apps – often in the service of examining some facet of modern, online culture. In particular, Galibert-Laine’s collaborations with Kevin B. Lee in Bottled Songs 1-4 (2021) and work like Watching the Pain of Others (2019) are some of the most fascinating examples of the mode.

I Would Like to Rage is no exception, using a variety of text, photo, and video windows popping up throughout to dig into the way that wrath is presented online – almost exclusively as an outlet for the injustice suffered by male commentators. The film ponders how being denied access to such cathartic emotion can be felt by those who are discouraged from accessing it, merging that line of inquiry into a quote from the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal about how reality develops from performance. ‘Act it and rage will come,’ Galibert-Laine seems to deduce, and her playful attempt to follow this advice raises questions both about the oft-derided performativity of online sentiment and the level to which social regulations are so ingrained as to see us self-govern our emotions.

Director, producer, editing: Chloe Galibert-Laine
Venue: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Signed)
In French, English
12 minutes

She cannot return to her home region of Donetsk, occupied since 2014 by Russian forces, and the cities such as Mariupol, wiped off the face of the Earth since her formative experiences there. Vividly sensorial, and politically trenchant in times of widespread war and displacement, her film explores its themes with a poetic feel for one family’s defining moments, with a modest and compact scope and running-time that never over-bets on its delicate experimentation. All this has cohered to make the essayistic doc, narrated by Chernykh, a fine choice of opening film for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, where it is screening as a world premiere in the Envision Competition. 

The first memory Chernykh shares in A Picture to Remember is of drinking champagne in the basement of the Kyiv morgue where her mother was once employed. The liquid hisses, loud over her retelling, and golden bubbles zing up past the close-up of an eye, making the intensity of this moment unmistakable. The family believed they would be safest from harm down there, on the first night of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine ordered by Russian president Vladimir Putin in February 2022. The incongruity of the decadent activity and morbid setting for this family of doctors from Donetsk, as celebratory life mixes with the proximity of death, sums up the new nonsensical and absurd reality. The surrealism of war and its ongoing assault on the certainty of concepts such as home and its orderly routines lead to many such strange reality breaks.

Chernykh sensitively pieces together black and white family photographs and grainy home movies with evocative imagery of freedoms and joys, looming threats and fear. The sky above holds birds, fireworks and, as it grows more hostile, missile trails. A trip to Mariupol with friends to go skydiving, without telling her frantic parents, is a cherished memory for the ages, even as she tries to forget the city’s subsequent decimation. Other fragments of former times (parasites observed through the microscope of Chernykh’s mother, for instance, or the smell of baked potatoes and cooking oil) are recalled with the overwhelming sensory immediacy that accompanies risk to one’s existence, and the pain of exile and nostalgia. Intricate sound design, amplifying details from this store of stories, layers the past with the present. An experimental delight in the visual and auditory possibilities of the film medium shows the consolation of creation. There is a sense that, her trust shattered by war, Chernykh has been able to re-fix her impressions in place through filmmaking, taking back control of her own impressions and history.

Chernykh and her mother conduct Zoom calls with her grandmother, who stayed in Donetsk when they moved and is now physically cut off from them, sometimes under bombardment — one of Ukraine’s countless stories of generational separation caused by the intractable political conflict and mass internal migration. We hear that her grandmother, recounting the family tales of war, execution by firing squad, and Siberian exile, also loved to repeat the story of the reconstruction of Donbas after the Second World War. Black-and-white excerpts from Soviet-era movies have a starkly more bombastic tone, including Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas (1930) and M. L. Bilinski’s Donbas (1946), which show a region once glorified for its coal mining industry. Places, we understand, are always being mythologised and reconstituted, and cinema can help keep them alive in the minds of their former inhabitants, even if bombs destroy all architectural traces.

Director, Writer: Olga Chernykh
Editor: Katerzyna Boniecka
Cinematography: Yevgenia Bondarenko
Sound: Serhii Avdieiev
Sound Design: Benedikt Schiefer
Music: Maryana Klochko
Producer: Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon
Production Companies: Real Pictures, Lufilms, Tama Film Produktion
Sales: Real Pictures
Venue: IDFA (Envision Competition)
In Ukrainian and Russian
72 minutes

ORWA NYRABIA: To me it is essential that a festival is a platform for people to meet. It is not just about watching films. Watching films has a great role in our experience of the world, but I despise it when people talk about the educational role of documentary film, as it is about so much more than finding out how something works and what happened. It is about connecting together, of finding these moments of breaking out from our own daily bubbles and really getting to know that not all Asians look the same, that not all Arabs have the same opinion, and not all Americans eat too much. That to me is at the core of what a film festival does. It is an intensive break out, and I hope we can provide a moderated space for different films from different viewpoints that really approach or carry us to different conflicts around the world, including what’s happening in Gaza today, in rich ways but in an atmosphere that is simply safe, with debates that enrich our views of the people involved in these conflicts. At IDFA we will have many conflicts represented and everything is getting very hot. When we programmed this festival it was all before October 7, and there is a kind of serendipity or kismet in the fact that we are in the eye of the storm with the programme we have done. I had interest in the political facet of what we were doing, but it was not that that drove the choices. Today I’m afraid that the political reality will colour the entire programme, and I hope that we manage to not make the world’s political disasters be painted in colours too solid; that it at least remains an interesting, nuanced, complex image of the world.

FV: In terms of bringing people together, with the global mood and conversations so tense and fraught right now, how do you navigate the different positions? Do you think it’s incumbent on the festival to take political stances, or is that not its role?

ON: I think it is absolutely a festival’s role to take political stances, but my political stance here is not one of saying I am pro this, or against that. My political stance is to try and to appreciate all the humans trying to break out of this cycle of violence, and to try to give a platform to all of them. It is about ceasing fire now, but it is not about fighting over who started it, and trying to pick which month of which year is the beginning of what, and there is something about being truly progressive that is about looking forward, towards the future. In that sense, I do have a lot of respect for the pain of so many people on different sides of different conflicts, and I am not willing to abandon that. I’m not here to have empathy towards one pain and not the other. I think this is the privilege of being in a safe country. I think when we are in safe countries instead of just joining the fight, and transferring conflicts, we can have the privilege of being able to moderate.

FV: A lot of people are saying right now they are saturated with the news, and this eternal cycle of social media, that they feel a need to switch off. Do you think that documentary as a format can do things that the news media cannot, in terms of re-engaging people when they are feeling fatigued or disoriented?

ON: I don’t think that the moment of extreme pain is the right moment for everybody to contemplate. I think people also have the right to feel they don’t want to contemplate this now, if they are too angry, or too tired. IDFA is one of those festivals that have a very wide spectrum of films, and in the offer there are also films that might feel to some like full escapism from reality but might actually be the right films for somebody else to be watching today. I think we should all keep our own agency over what we need to be thinking about now. What you will not get from our programme is facile answers, so if what is needed is somebody to tell you that you are right I think and I hope that that is not very easy to find here, because most of the films we are selecting do offer highly subjective angles that are complex. When I programmed, for example, a conversation on stage between Sky Hopinka, the Native American artist and filmmaker, and Basma al-Sharif, the renowned Palestinian video artist, I thought that would be a discussion at a moment everybody would be capable of contemplating difficult questions. I did not know that it would be in a moment of extremes. This is not for everyone at every moment, but that’s why we keep on coming back, and returning to questions.

FV: The focus programme Fabrications explores documentary as constructed. Today with AI and all this proliferating disinformation, do you get worried that the image is losing its power as evidence or some kind of bearer of truth, and that we are getting into some kind of place where people are just not able to believe what they see anymore?

ON: I think so, but I think this is great. I think there is a massive philosophical reduction in the way we treat image as the truth, and to me, it is actually a very promising new beginning, when we actually start to realise that sometimes a fully fabricated image is so much more truthful than an image that is done with somebody’s mobile in the street. In a way the narrative around an image and its surroundings are what makes film, and truth is in the eye of the beholder. It’s something that we should stop simplifying, by thinking that BBC objectivity is the reference. We’ve seen how easy it is today, starting with the Arab Spring and citizen street journalism, and continuing in Ukraine and every conflict today, that real images taken by citizens in the streets are doubted, labelled fake news and then lost, while fake news is labelled as truth. In my opinion, actually it has always been like this, but we did not notice, and with AI and the globalisation of media as we experience it today, we now see that image is not just the truth, that it is the truth plus plus, and these many pluses after the truth are also a matter of choice.

FV: Can you comment on your choice of Peter Greenaway for a retrospective, whose visually extravagant films are often thought about more in terms of fiction?

ON: The unclassifiable Greenaway is a cinematic thinker whose view of cinema is my proposal. What he has been trying to do for a few decades already might be, at least in my opinion, much more timely today even than when he first did it. I have this crazy idea of what a festival is. It translates in different ways, but I think of a festival as the ground zero for a contagion. It is not about whether Greenaway is documentary or fiction, or whether he is right or wrong, but that he does spread a particular virus of questioning what we are doing, and I think that’s fascinating and inspiring. Today, in an overtly commercialised, post-pandemic film world, it’s quite interesting to go back and listen to the guy who first tried to make an interactive film. In a world that relies heavily on using the word storytelling as a basis for defending why film matters and should be funded, it’s very interesting to listen to the guy who always thought that storytelling will kill cinema. To me, it is about the complexity that he offers, and about this contagion of being skeptical. He is the best agnostic I know when it comes to what cinema is, and he certainly is not a fiction director, nor a documentary director. He certainly does not see cinema in this binary.

FV: This idea of breaking down classifications is very interesting, and obviously we have seen a rise in the popularity of hybrid documentaries. This year, your IDFA on Stage section links with new media and performance art. Do you feel the traditional, conventional form of documentary is becoming not fit for the times?

To me, the opportunity that a platform like IDFA can offer is this multiplicity, and pluralism of possibilities. Now, which one will die, and which one will grow, I don’t know, I just know that they are valid proposals, and that we will enjoy thinking about these questions that you raised, and asking whether this will be the future. Maybe you attend one performance in IDFA On Stage and feel like that should be the future, and maybe you watch another one and think it will be very niche. So, in a way, it is an experimentation space. IDFA On Stage is very precious to me, because this was one of my first changes in the programme. IDFA used to do brilliant music and documentary events, where you would have a film with music in it and then musicians after, and as much as I enjoyed that I also found it very limited or limiting, and that it could be more open. I have no certainty about anything, and to me this is what fuels that kind of multifaceted programming. I love documentary film for many reasons, but I am not a fanatic. The easiest definition I have of what documentary is, would be an artistic processing of reality. That’s it, and then it can be endless.

Shot between Zurich, Toronto and La Gomera, this audacious but never bombastic exploration of the big ideas by which we define our existence reflects on the human obsession with what is on the other side of things, be it dreams of another life (in his family’s migration from Switzerland to Canada), our negotiation with death (he films his parents in their final years), and the process of creation in nature and filmmaking (as something is conjured from nothing.) Though the New Agey leanings of its ponderings, narrated by the director, on Buddhist philosophy, reincarnation and cosmic reckonings may turn off more cynical viewers, While the Green Grass Grows is grounded by perceptive insight and playful levity, not to mention technical finesse, and doesn’t drag once, despite a running time of nearly three hours.

Comprising two parts of what will be a seven-part epic series, it screens at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and has already netted the Grand Jury prize at Visions du Reel, and the Gold Dove for International Competition Documentary Film at DOK Leipzig. Its impressive scope and mesmeric beauty assures it a long festival run as a major addition to Mettler’s body of work. Active since the 1980s, Mettler is celebrated for his experimental, existential and wide-roaming musings on weirdness and wonder, including Picture of Light (1994), his arctic quest to capture the Northern Lights, and Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002), a cross-continental journey into the many ways humans seek escapism and transcendence.

Death is a labour that must be worked on deeply, like birth, it is suggested in While the Green Grass Grows, which strikes one as a form of mental preparation for the passing of both of Mettler’s parents — a journey we follow in the lead-up and aftermath. Amusing, endearing footage of Mettler questioning his hard-case parents about their lives and what they make of them now at their home in Switzerland takes on a deep poignancy as time does the inevitable. We’re invited intimately into the material reality of the process of the physical body breaking down, as his father is shown on his hospital deathbed, followed by the corpse’s cremation, and the scattering of the ashes, leaving memory in its wake. If all past moments continue to exist somehow, cinema is here to help keep them tangible.

Stunning and inventive footage of the natural world sparks a strong sense of awe and wonder, as Mettler chases the melting waters of spring in the Swiss mountains, and muses on the forest’s cycles of nature with his tattoo artist neighbour Gass, and gardener Maria. Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s belief that nothing dies, simply changes form, just as clouds are formulated from other particles, provides a form of comfort as Mettler prepares to say goodbyes. A Covid lockdown in Toronto in 2020 leads the director down more indoor rabbit-holes in search of meaning. He digs out old rolls of celluloid and other forgotten items, including his first Super 8 film The Boy Who Bought A Dream, which even then explored the secret of death, leading him to conclude that he always makes the same film over and over — artistic creation being another cycle of reformulation. Just as rivers flow, capital moves human life forward, and in one quirky, philosophical scene stemming from Mettler’s tendency to defamiliarise everything before him, he contemplates a wad of paper cash (the thousands of Swiss francs that allowed the film project to happen), and ponders the arbitrary power consumerism (and the odd moneyed acquaintance) are able to bestow. Nothing exists in isolation — and it can seem we’re seeing it all for the first time, in Mettler’s thought-provoking and often sublime cine-psychedelic world of endless transformation and cross-pollination.

Director, Writer, Cinematography, Sound, Narrator: Peter Mettler
Editors: Jordan Kawai, Peter Mettler
Sound Design: Jordan Kawai
Producers: Cornelia Seitler, Peter Mettler, Brigitte Hofer
Production companies, Sales: maximage (Switzerland), Grimthorpe Film (Canada) 
Venue: IDFA (Signed section)
In English
166 minutes