The 37th edition of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam is well underway, after opening with the world premiere of a film that might be called part nonfiction, part fiction, part real and part artificial.
About a Hero stars Werner Herzog, or an AI facsimile thereof, and uses a famous dictum of his as a starting point: the German filmmaker once famously remarked, “A computer will not make a film as good as mine in 4,500 years.” Putting that to the test, director Piotr Winiewicz worked with machine learning engineers to task AI with writing a script based on Herzog’s body of cinematic work (Herzog permitted the venture).
The result is a story about a possible suicide or murder of a man in a German industrial town who worked at a firm developing a mysterious “infinity machine.” A supporting character has a passionate affair with a toaster (not sure what that says about Werner Herzog or the “mind” of AI).
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About a Hero is one of a baker’s dozen of films in International Competition at IDFA, almost all of them world premieres. Overall, the festival will present 254 documentaries and 27 new media projects.
“I think we have a brilliant program,” says IDFA Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia. “We have very strong competitions. I do dare to say there will be instant classics here. There are some really brilliant films.”
This is Nyrabia’s 7th and final year leading the festival. Earlier this month, he announced he would be stepping down in July 2025.
“Don’t feel sad,” Nyrabia tells Deadline. “If you trust me, trust me on this one too, that this is the right time, this is the right moment to do this for everybody’s benefit, for IDFA’s benefit and for mine.”
Nyrabia, a native of Syria, succeeded IDFA co-founder and longtime festival leader Ally Derks in 2018. During his tenure, he had to negotiate the pandemic and last year he faced one of his biggest challenges as protests erupted at the festival over Israel’s invasion of Gaza following the October 7th Hamas sneak attack on Israel. IDFA could have played it safe this year by steering clear of content from that part of the world, but in fact the 2024 program abounds with films from Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. Among them is Eyes of Gaza, a “hellish portrait” that follows “three Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza as they are forced put their lives at risk while trying to do their work,” as the IDFA program writes.
“This is a film, I think the first to appear from the newly minted OTT platform of Al Jazeera network that’s called Al Jazeera 360,” Nyrabia notes. “This film is particularly interesting because it is in a way a reportage that sticks to these three journalists on the ground in Gaza. In a way, by staying with them — when they sleep and when they wake up, when they see their children, and when they go to work — that makes this kind of reportage a little more relevant to a festival like IDFA.”
Screening in International Competition is the world premiere of Rule of Stone, directed by Israeli-Canadian filmmaker Danae Elon. “Rule of Stone is an exceptional film looking at the history of Jerusalem as a city and architecture as an enforcer of colonial power,” Nyrabia observes.
He also cites The 1957 Transcripts, directed by Israeli filmmaker Ayelet Heller, noting it’s a film “built on recently revealed documents from Israeli archives on a massacre that happened in 1957 where the inhabitants of a Palestinian village within the borders of Israel were massacred in a day and all the perpetrators were later acquitted.”
IDFA is also screening the 2003 film Route 181, Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel, a documentary directed by Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi and Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan, which Nyrabia sees “as a commentary on simplified identity politics where we imagine a conflict only between inherited identities. So, people who belong to this heritage are fighting the others who belong to a different heritage. And I think there’s another, a third way, that creates a new identity, which is the identity of filmmakers who meet around an ethical position, who meet around making films with a real faith in solidarity with those who are oppressed.”
In its Best of Fests section – limited to top documentaries from around the world that premiered at earlier festivals – IDFA will showcase Oscar contender No Other Land, winner of the main prize for documentary at the Berlin Film Festival in February. The film, set in a rocky and remote area of the West Bank where Palestinian villagers are subject to an expulsion order from the Israel Defense Forces, is directed by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers. No Other Land was supported by a grant from IDFA’s Bertha Fund.
“If people watched the great documentary works done by different filmmakers of different backgrounds about this history of the Arab-Israeli conflict or of Palestine-Israel, I think, to say the least, what happened last year [on October 7th] wouldn’t have been a surprise, if not avoided in the first place,” Nyrabia comments. “There is so much for one to become cynical about what we can do. But I also think that after all this terrible year [of violence] watching new films, even watching the old films, gets a different meaning. It becomes a different experience. And I hope it helps.”
Along with No Other Land, films in the Best of Fests section include Sugarcane and Blink (both from National Geographic), War Game, Union, State of Silence, Sabbath Queen, MTV Documentary Films’ Black Box Diary, Agent of Happiness from Bhutan, and Asif Kapadia’s 2073.
IDFA’s Guest of Honor this year is Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez, director of the Oscar contending film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. The documentary explores a key moment in history in the late 1950s and early ‘60s when many African countries were gaining their independence after long eras of colonial domination. But in the case of Congo, Belgium and the U.S. were reluctant to cede the country’s mineral wealth after the election of Patrice Lumumba as Congo’s first democratically-chosen leader. Belgium, the U.S., and even the UN secretary general conspired to oust the charismatic pan-African politician.
Nyrabia describes Grimonprez as an “outstanding, exceptional arthouse filmmaker who brings together the artistic sensitivities and language that is really singular with very serious political, historical research. He does this in a very special way. This is, to a far extent, what I would love to see more of in the documentary space.”
IDFA runs from Nov. 14-24 in the Dutch capital. Coming on the heels of the U.S. presidential election, in which border security became a leading issue, the festival offers a timely section called Dead Angle: Borders, a showcase of 17 films that touch on the issue in one fashion or another. The slate includes On the Border, set in the desert city of Agadez in Niger that has been a “hub of trade routes since time immemorial,” as the program notes. “But Agadez is also a place where migrants pass through on their way to Europe.”
The Guest, directed by Zvika Gregory Portnoy and Zuzanna Solakiewicz, revolves around the border of Poland and Belarus, where a lengthy wall was erected by Poland to keep out mostly Arab refugees. In the film, a Polish family takes in “an exhausted Syrian refugee, the 27-year-old Alhyder… Without a hint of sensationalism, the camera reads the emotions on the faces of the silent Polish family members and their grateful guest. The situation is dire, and a solution remains out of reach.”
“I’m very happy we’re doing the side program we call Dead Angle. This is a multi-year program. Every year we will look at one ‘dead angle’ through film,” Nyrabia explains. “We decided, okay, let’s think about borders this year… these lines that nations put in between them and die for them; there’s a certain absurdity to the notion of borders. I think borders are clearly one of the main questions of history at this moment, like how do we look at relationships between different groups of people, between different countries and their borders?”
Nyrabia continues, “[Dead Angle: Borders] became really a very telling program that goes all the way from the notion of a ‘fortress Europe’ that is closing its borders against the other, to the history of Palestine-Israel and that moving border that was created in ’47 but keeps moving all the time and keeps being contested or keeps being at the center of the problem.”
Sometimes only after the festival program has been selected do thematic elements cohere, Nyrabia adds. “Many ideas that when you are working [on the program], these are separate ideas, but when they come together you realize that you’ve been working in some kind of synergy, even if it was not all schematically planned, but it comes together.”
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