IDFA balanced its role of discovery showcase, financing event and awards season stop‑off. But as docs struggle at cinemas, change may be needed.
There is a mix of trepidation and excitement within the international documentary sector as the year’s doc festivals draw to a close and awards season cranks up.
Documentaries, ergo independent arthouse feature films in general, are struggling at cinemas. At the same time, there is a boom in documentary making: DOK Leipzig, Doc Lisboa, Ji.hlava and International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) all received huge numbers of submissions post-pandemic. IDFA alone had more than 4,000 titles vying for just over 200 slots.
“Releasing a documentary is more challenging than ever, especially since docs on platforms, notably Netflix, are very different from docs on TV and are stronger competition for theatrical docs,” notes Bertrand Faivre, who runs London and Paris- based production and sales outfit The Bureau.
“Interesting and beautiful is not enough,” he says of what is now required for docs to break through on the big screen.
Faivre recently worked with Wild Bunch on Yannick Kergoat’s tax evasion doc Tax Me If You Can, which premiered at San Sebastian. The documentary has companies such as Amazon and Apple firmly in its sights as the subjects of the film. It is therefore not on the shopping lists for streamers and will be pursuing a cinema release.
Faivre questions the role of festivals in helping documentaries find theatrical buyers. He suggests they are too cautious and “pursue an auteur approach to documentary, which is sometimes forgetting about the topic. In documentary, I believe topic is king.” In other words, viewers might not remember who directed The Tinder Swindler but they certainly remember the topic.
At IDFA, artistic director Orwa Nyrabia has the job of trying to make the festival as attractive as possible to the major US and international streamers and distributors, while also promoting filmmakers from countries with less established film industries. For example, Sierra Leone’s Mohamed James Sessy Kamara premiered his Generation Africa documentary Sisterhood in IDFA.
Nyrabia introduced market screenings for the bigger players last year, expanding them for this edition. “These are films we do not select for the festival but their makers and promoters would like to make use of the platform that is IDFA,” Nyrabia explains.
Awards exposure
This has meant awards hopefuls such as US director Ondi Timoner’s MTV-backed Last Flight Home, Brett Morgen’s David Bowie doc Moonage Daydream, Sara Dosa’s Fire Of Love and Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’ HBO documentary The Janes, among others, have been showing in Amsterdam. This has enabled their backers to use IDFA as a useful stop on the campaign trail, to get them seen by potential voters and to do some extra press and PR.
Meanwhile awards contenders such as Bianca Stigter’s Holocaust doc Three Minutes — A Lengthening, released in the US by Neon subsidiary Super Ltd, actually premiered at IDFA in 2021.
The IDFA Forum remains one of the key co-production events in the industry calendar. This year, Chilean director Maite Alberdi, who was Oscar-nominated for The Mole Agent in 2020, has been in town pitching The Eternal Memory, about an elderly couple, one living with Alzheimer’s disease. IDFA is where many filmmakers such as Alberdi come in search of sales agents and gap financing.
Significantly, one of Nyrabia’s most fervent supporters is Oscar winner Laura Poitras, who has been the guest of honour at IDFA with her Venice Golden Lion winner and leading awards contender All The Beauty And The Bloodshed.
“It is important to know the person organising this festival is a filmmaker who has put his life on the line many times,” she enthuses of Nyrabia. “He is my dear friend.”
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