A festival to make you fulfilled

Derks

There’re many things people tell themselves they want to do at least once in their lifetime.

Such things might include meeting the Pope, climbing Mount Everest, addressing the United Nations, visiting Disneyland, becoming rich, and of course meeting and falling in love with the guy or babe of your dreams.

For people who have such to-do lists, one thing they have to add to their list is an attendance of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam popularly known as IDFA and founded by Ally Derks.

It prides itself as the biggest documentary film festival in the world, the ideal meeting place for film professionals and a key launch pad for independent documentary films.

Until you attend an IDFA, you just won’t know what you’re missing. How do you even begin to describe it? Wonderful? Amazing? Great? Life changing? Fulfilling? Frankly, IDFA deserves to be accorded all the praise terms in the world and more.

It holds every year in Amsterdam, a city that also deserves every praise word imaginable, and it brings people together from all over the world in an atmosphere devoid of class, religion, race, rank and all those other divisive factors.

It holds in a casual atmosphere that makes it very easy for every attendant to attend to the business IDFA is really about: documentary films. Selling them. Buying them. Analysing them. Exposing them to new audiences. Just celebrating them.

Let’s be frank and realistic. Documentaries aren’t the world’s favourite movies. It can’t really be said they light up the screen like Hollywood fiction blockbusters Star Wars and Men In Black. But they have their own selling point regardless, and IDFA presents them in such a convivial atmosphere that you’ll fall in love with them and even start thinking of making your own.

It takes a mature mind, a deep mind, a mind really willing to learn to really understand and make documentaries. So what IDFA does is to gather such minds together on an annual basis for the further promotion of the documentary film sector.

Since documentaries actually appeal to a certain set of people, and yet IDFA has been holding since 1988, one doesn’t need a soothsayer to tell one that IDFA is an extremely successful festival. Veritable proof of its ongoing success is its 2015 edition which held from November 18^th to 29^th.

On Friday, November 13^th, just five days before it was supposed to commence, bomb explosions and killings rocked the city of Paris, France and made worldwide news. Considering that Amsterdam and Paris are both in Europe, and just a train, car or bus away from each other, it just wasn’t possible that the Paris attacks wouldn’t have any sort of effect on IDFA.

Its effect(s) were not in terms of attendance however. With people looking forward to it every year, they still trooped out to IDFA 2015, regardless of the attacks which might have negatively affected the attendance of some other event that hasn’t become ingrained into its sector like IDFA has.

So the major effects the attacks had on IDFA were that security was increased, albeit in a subtle manner that it wasn’t even noticeable, and scheduled screenings of a documentary on Jesse ‘The Devil’ Hughes, front man of the Eagles of Death Metal band which’s concert was attacked in Paris, were cancelled.

And so, with the matter of the Paris attacks’ effect on IDFA taken care of, the stage was set for another successful IDFA edition.

With its organizers continually strategizing on new concepts to introduce into it to keep it interesting, some of the features that make IDFA memorable are a daily filmmakers’ breakfast where accredited festival attendants are encouraged to start their festival days with hearty breakfasts that also serve the purpose of getting to meet and know other festival attendants.

And just in case you don’t make the filmmakers’ breakfasts, the daily Guests Meet Guests which hold in the evenings are a further opportunity for accredited festival attendants to get to know each other over drinks and finger foods. 

Though casual, IDFA is a very serious affair, and many deals are made during the twelve days of the festival. Such deals include funding of projects and selling of finished projects.

Unsurprisingly, and even expectedly, awards also play a crucial role in IDFA’s success. And at IDFA 2015, a new awards structure of two prizes (best film, and special jury prize) per competition was introduced for IDFA’s competitions.  The awards come with encouraging cash prizes, and some of the winning films were Don Juan which won the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary and Ukrainian Sheriffs which won the IDFA Special Jury Award for Feature-Length Documentary.

When The Earth Seems To Be Light, At Home In The World, A Strange Love Affair With Ego, Drawing Room, Sonita, My Aleppo, Ninnoc were some of the other award-winning films.

No festival can succeed without a truly distinguished guest. Errol Morris, an American director considered as one of the most important documentary directors of our time, was that guest at IDFA 2015.

In addition to a retrospective of Morris’ works being screened, he also compiled IDFA 2015’s Top 10 and spoke about his work and his Top 10 choices in a master class.

The Academy Award, popularly known as Oscar, is the movie world’s most important, and it was only right that it should have an influence on IDFA as probably every film professional in the world wants to win it.

So Tom Oyer, awards manager at the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences, organizers of the Oscars, was brought in as an IDFA special guest to explain the Oscars’ qualifying criteria for short and feature-length documentaries.

Amsterdam is also a selling point for IDFA. People who get to visit Amsterdam through IDFA find it hard to forget the quaint city which is very vibrant in all its facets and has such attractions as a relaxed marijuana policy and a world renowned Red Light District.

So IDFA visitors find it extremely difficult to get Amsterdam out of their system, and the best excuse to visit again is to attend another IDFA.

Frankly, gushing and praising IDFA will take a whole book to write about.

A big question however has to be asked. Which is more beneficial to the other: IDFA to Amsterdam, or Amsterdam to IDFA?

That’s indeed a very big question.