Democrats A standout, Camilla Nielsson’s excellent, richly ironic Democrats avoids policy-paper treatment of its subject—the making of Zimbabwe’s new constitution in a not-really-quite-post-Mugabe era—to give a breathtakingly candid, on-the-ground view of people in action. Granted extraordinary access in a country known for police-state tactics and prone to banning foreign media, Nielsson’s (talking-headless) verité one-ups the classic horse race of Primary (60) with its two larger-than-life personalities and life-threateningly high stakes. During a competitive public-comment process that the Mugabe government exploits by busing in claques praising strong central rule, democracy itself is fiercely re-negotiated. The chief players, whom we follow from dusty city outskirts to conference rooms (if not to prison), are Mugabe crony Paul Mangwana of the ruling ZANU-PF party and the opposition, Western-educated lawyer Douglas Mwonzora of the Movement for Democratic Change. Mangwana, a toothy rotund Tammany Hall type, and Mwonzora, diligent idealist in glasses, can even chuckle over disagreements, but any smiles come with the awareness of menacing forces lurking just offstage. That goes for both sides, as Mangwana is justifiably paranoid about how his government views his cooperation; while able to keep up appearances, he’ll also huff and puff against “this level of disobedience” during the constitution-writing process. Whereas another filmmaker might have stuck with Mwonzora—we do see his touching sense of triumph, albeit limited, as the constitution is put together—Nielsson lets Mangwana give perhaps some of the truest, double-edged editorializing: “If you don’t change, you will be changed. Politics is about doing what is popular and what is popular changes.”
Invasion Abner Benaim’s Invasion, about the 1989 military incursion by the United States into Panama, is another documentary about a political process—that of memory and history. Benaim portrays the stories of anguish and pride behind the greater narrative, assembling a mosaic of recollections, and mapping the sites and rough timeline for the seizure of that “tropical Saddam Hussein” Manuel Noriega—all the way up to el jefe’s flight (under a tarp in the back of a car) and refuge-at-gunpoint in the Vatican Embassy. Traversing the city, which is periodically shown in snow-globe long shot, Benaim foregrounds his evenhandedness without getting pious or bogged down in wartime anecdotes by Panamanians, who run the gamut from a family who saw a missile land in their home, to a diplomatic Canal Zone official, to passersby on the street, to an upper-crust woman who served a soldier a T-bone steak. The invasion’s haunting central image is that of corpses strewn in the streets during the covered-up assault—a morbid tableau Benaim reenacts with eager participants, along with other incidents such as the looting of a refrigerator. All of which is recounted with rich and strange detail that should enlighten even those familiar with the 1992 Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary The Panama Deception. Influenced by The Act of Killing in his dogged, reflexive approach and his use of shock cuts, Benaim helps retrieve the invasion (again) from the memory hole. In a broader context, his film made a good other-end-of-the-bomb companion with another IDFA selection, Drone, which shows how the disconnect of modern warfare is only increasing. But as Benaim balances anti-gringo and pro-democracy sentiments, he reclaims the ordeal as a Panama story first.
Of Men and War Veterans endure their own traumatic memories in Of Men and War, perceptively programmed in apparently its first festival appearance since its premiere at Cannes. Perhaps Iraq fatigue and the film’s own exhaustiveness in depicting a gradual therapy-driven recovery process have accounted for the low profile. Director Laurent Bécue-Renard (whose De Guerre Lasses focused on Bosnian war widows) films how the experience of violence continues to rip apart the patients of The Pathway Home, a treatment center in Napa Valley. Group therapy sessions, which are the emotional centerpiece of the film, seethe with frustration, survivor guilt, and despair; dark shades are worn indoors, and chair-flipping walkouts are not uncommon. But Bécue-Renard hangs on—as does chief counselor Fred Gusman—without pretending that all of the men will recover. Bécue-Renard’s work won an IDFA award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, and, while it might seem perverse to mention both in the same sentence, so did Tea Time, another film facing the formal challenge of portraying group conversations in a room. Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi (The Lifeguard) shoots her subjects—high-school classmates who have been meeting regularly over tea for over 60 years—mostly in extreme close-ups, letting us read their experienced faces as we listen to their banter. Friendships and class dynamics, through snipes and sidesteps, go on display (and doll-house-perfect table sets are arrayed). The attitudes mingle conservative and let-it-all-hang-out viewpoints, making for a group portrait that’s a faithfully amnesiac crowd-pleaser without getting too cutesy (despite some way-too-easy reaction cuts to an embittered spinster).
Something Better to Come IDFA also had the world premieres of a couple of showy, variably successful documents of stamina against all odds. In Something Better to Come, Hanna Polak, telescoping 14 years of coverage into a single film, follows a pale teenager and her family and companions who live in a dump outside Moscow. It’s as poignant and eye-opening as one might expect (though I prefer Eduardo Coutinho’s Boca de Lixo), and perhaps headed to one-liner comparisons with Boyhood, but Polak’s arduous work manages to be stubbornly resistant when it comes to the psychology of its main subject especially, and adds in some ill-advised music cues. But if that film’s shortcomings could partly be attributed to the unusual challenges of its shooting conditions, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is a maddening example of a filmmaker who hobbles his work with a misguided artistic conceit. Featuring a Leviathan-esque cold open on a refugee boat on the high seas, director-cinematographer Morgan Knibbe takes a Wings of Desire approach to chronicling the sufferings, indignities, and loves of immigrants to Europe. Overusing what might be called a FloatiCam simulated-angel technique, and voiceover musings that seem to come from beyond the grave, Knibbe chooses a distracting, hamhanded poetics to tie together this urgent material.
How to Live Better sleight-of-hand could be found among IDFA’s retrospective presentations, specifically within a selection curated by Dutch artist Aernout Mik (who had a show of installations at MoMA a few years back). Mik’s own 2006 installation Raw Footage, showing at festival’s De Brakke Grond space, was a jaw-dropping channel-surfing collection of war rushes from Bosnia in the Nineties that reveals, among other things, female soldiers fully made up for battle. But my favorite was Marcel Lozinski’s How to Live, a deeply unnerving and at times hilarious hybrid documentary about a summer camp for young families run by the Union of Young Polish Socialists. Amid rickety lakeside cabins, husbands and wives are observed and graded on their political commitment and their participation in activities, with nosy supervisors awkwardly dropping by to ask questions. Lozinski, a leading light in Poland’s rich history of documentary, is keenly attuned to the satirical and dramatic possibilities of the bizarre situation, pitting one overeager official (who neatly illustrates the tendency toward cronyism) against an outsider couple who couldn’t care less about the whole charade. Which, arguably, might describe the film itself (without insult): Lozinski freely staged scenes and constructed his narrative in seeking to expose the perpetual window-dressing and conformity demanded by Communist rule.
1974, une partie de campagne IDFA 2014 also programmed a series at the EYE Film Institute based on reenactments entitled Framing Reality, which I had the pleasure of Q&Aing and which accordingly I’ll leave at that, with just a brief special mention for one revival title: Jon Bang Carlsen’s enduring 1981 hang-out in the demimonde of Hollywood extras, Hotel of the Stars. One final, rare treat: Raymond Depardon’s droll early feature about a French presidential campaign, 1974, une partie de campagne, awaiting its double feature with Primary, or Democrats, for that matter. Depardon’s film spotlights a 48-year-old patrician candidate for “change in continuity,” Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who’s first seen wandering a forest in his suit, and later adored by crowds despite his bureaucratic campaigning skills (albeit with the help of Charles Aznavour at a rally). It’s a dispiriting and all too apt record of the political process as a mundane and weirdly lonely drive to power. Quite literally: at one point, d’Estaing beetles along at the wheel of his own car, and away into the night.
title: “Festivals Idfa” ShowToc: true date: “2024-04-15” author: “Mary Salley”
Smash & Grab Perhaps the flashiest entry, though nonetheless edifying, Smash & Grab lays out the modus operandi of the “Pink Panthers,” a group of international jewelry thieves responsible for multimillion-dollar hauls. By concealing the identities of the Panther interviewees, the filmmakers manage to get an unusually detailed scoop on how it all goes down, and director Havana Marking (Afghan Star) finds a way to keep the chronicle visual: the ex-Panthers are represented through rotoscope animation and voiceover (not their own). Bookended by extraordinary video of a Dubai heist and testimony by investigators, the film is virtually a manual for jewelry theft and what hackers call social engineering—especially through the female Panther’s fascinating tell-alls about her activities as a scout and femme fatale. It’s also a fable of postwar chaos, since the criminal enterprise of the Panthers are traceable back to the violent haven for smugglers that arose in the Balkans through the Nineties. As with The Imposter, this ground was previously covered by a New Yorker article, but it’s snappily told and rich with procedural detail and grit.
Karsu Not as readily attention-grabbing and thus all the more worthy of highlighting is the atypical music documentary Karsu, Mercedes Stalenhoef’s exquisitely shot and edited film about Dutch-Turkish singer-pianist Karsu Dönmez. The 22-year-old chanteuse, who is usually marketed in Norah Jones terms, is shown waiting tables at her parents’ Amsterdam restaurant-café, paying her dues with stutters and leaps of musicianship, performing in concerts that grow from the intimate to the grand in scale (Carnegie Hall), while balancing life and career and handling the courtship of record labels with her father. But what Stalenhoef understands with such warmth and depth is the complicated role of family in Karsu’s journey: the film is really a kind of family love story. The performer’s charming, supportive, but protective father (who has his own doc-worthy history as a leftist in Turkey) and her sounding-board/underminer mother, are equally part of her story, all within the context of traditional Turkish family values. The documentary’s rhythms often evoke a staged fiction feature, and there are some truly inspired moments—a slow zoom on the faces of three emoting audience members during a tiny university common-room concert, or Karsu’s father’s impromptu anxious explication of the distinctions between private love and public expression, which encapsulates much of the tension in the rich, centuries-old tradition of romantic poetry and song.
Futures Past Futures Past zeroes in on a father-son bond, intertwined with a very different professional pursuit, namely, commodities trading, in this case on the now-defunct floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Director Jordan Melamed logged his own years hollering and hand-gesturing through thousands of dollars in trades a day, before detouring into independent filmmaking. His father Leo, a pioneer in financial futures and a Polish Holocaust survivor, is a riveting performer, a master of no-bullshit analysis and guilt-tripping. His muscular philosophy of money and life—“It wasn’t a mistake at the time” he says of loss-making trades he does not waste time regretting—outweighs the director’s own plodding framework and voiceover, in a provocative, maybe unwitting echo of their relationship (cf. My Architect). But Melamed the younger also has his own rapport with floor traders to drawn upon, one that yields an engaging view of the rough-and-tumble personalities facing obsolescence in the face of computerized trading—a rather unexpected discovery, like finding artisans employed in a bank.
I Am Breathing Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon’s I Am Breathing originated partly as a blog written by its subject. Our guide on a sadly inevitable death trip, Neil Platt is a witty Scot rendered quadriplegic by a hereditary motor neuron disease, homebound and now reckoning with life and death as upbeat wife and adorable toddler look on. He painstakingly dictates messages to his blog, hangs out with friends who knew him in more mobile days, and laments his greatest fear: the loss of communicative skills, and the ensuing silence that his son won’t understand. Platt’s sense of humor and perspective, and the freedom he finds in writing—and which he faces losing as the illness progresses—are the film’s driving force. The theme of entrapment is literalized in Janusz Mrozowski’s Bad Boy High Security Cell, a feature-length monologue-in-pieces by a Polish prisoner held in solitary confinement. He’s not terribly interesting—a teenaged thief who happened to get caught and now submits to being filmed—nor is the film, but its subject undergoes a morbidly intriguing, protracted process of becoming, like a Warholian keep-talking gambit that doesn’t come off. The mirror of this camera yields far less than the actual mirror and camera of Kossakovsky’s 2005 instant classic Svyato, screened as part of the festival’s retrospective. After observing his son encountering a mirror for the first time in his life, the filmmaker shows the towheaded boy bestowing three kisses: on Dad, on the mirror, and on the camera.
Danube Hospital — SMZ Ost Made for television, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Danube Hospital – SMZ Ost (Donauspital) might drop off theatrical radars, but it’s another lucid anatomy of an institution by a precise chronicler who continues to record the proliferation of moving-image media and automation in both expected and unexpected quarters. Though not carrying quite the same éclat as Our Daily Bread (05) or Abendland (11), Danube Hospital is an HD-shot geometric examination of a Vienna hospital’s treatment rooms, camera-enhanced invasive surgery, cafeteria and other prep areas, and robot-patrolled delivery corridors—behind-the-scenes parallels to the within-the-body mission of the hospital. Not everything is modernized enough for one elderly women, though, who, apparently receiving her last rites, chides the priest: “You should really hurry it up a little.” Echoing Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital, Geyrhalter’s film ends with a coffin on its way out.
EMPIRE Finally, at the cultural center de Brakke Grond, IDFA 2012 also presented a cacophonous one-room omnibus installation of works by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth, but my attention was drawn down the hall to EMPIRE by Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma. A multi-channel installation comprised of screens mounted in a hallway and a separate room with its own triptych, its ecumenical chronicle is accurately subtitled “A documentary project about the unintended consequences of Dutch colonialism.” Part of a still larger endeavor, this chapter spotlights members of the sui generis communities that were byproducts of Dutch trading conquests in ages past. The subjects include a mixed-race photographer in Ghana descended from Dutch-Ghanaian slave traders, Cape Malay inhabitants of Cape Town who still sing Dutch ballads, tombstone workers in Tamil Nadu, and a tiny Jewish community in Indonesia, the latter in a funny-melancholic-baffling segment counterpointing a man who belatedly discovered his Jewish ancestry and a mindboggling group of Waffen SS war reenactors. Hovering around 10 minutes apiece, the uninflected loops don’t need to press the points of the complex human narratives they unearth, each of which short-circuits conventional conceptions of a history long laid to rest. These deceptively calm sketches are micro-portraits of hate, hope, and everything in between, with such occasional editorial flourishes as a man performing a Nederlandsliedje serenade to a girl “barely 16 years old” (per the lyrics of the song) that is edited to match an Aryan-blond girl with a puppy. I finish this report, of course, in another remnant of 17th-century Dutch colonialism, New Amsterdam… Awards at IDFA 2012 went to features feted elsewhere (First Cousin Once Removed, Searching for Sugar Man) as well as Esther Hertog’s dispatch from a Jewish enclave within Hebron, Soldier on the Roof. Before the festival began, there had been reports of government funding cuts to the Dutch Cultural Media Fund looming in 2017. But the festival’s 25th edition surged ahead fearlessly with a diverse selection of international documentaries that bore fruit to any who looked.
